Room Addition Rules: Guidelines for Growing Your Home |

Room Addition Rules: Guidelines for Growing Your Home

| By Roy Rasmussen | Category: Home Improvement

A room addition can add floor space and value to your home, along with other benefits like extra walls, exterior views, and daylight. However, building a room addition is as complex as building a room in a new house, and requires the same careful planning to avoid mistakes that can cost you a lot of money and aggravation. Here are some guidelines to help you plan your project and keep your room addition costs low in the process.

Types of Room Addition Designs

Let’s start by reviewing the types of popular room addition designs available to you. There are six major approaches to building room additions:

Outside structure additions expand a home by adding exterior living space, which can be open, screened in, or enclosed by glass. This category of additions includes porches and sunrooms. Outside structure additions are one of the easiest and least expensive types of additions to build, with some types of sunrooms costing less than $100, making this category extremely popular.
Bump-out additions expand a room by extending a wall out a few feet.
Single room additions add a new room. Examples of typical single room additions are master suites, family rooms, and mud rooms.
Wing additions expand a house horizontally by adding multiple rooms to a single floor.
Second story additions expand a house vertically by adding a floor.
Two-story additions expand a house both horizontally and vertically by adding a complete two-story structure adjacent to the original unit. This is the most laborious and expensive type of room addition, averaging $156,000.

Defining the Purpose of Your Addition

When considering your design options, you should first consider the purpose of your room addition. Your purpose might be:

To increase the value of your home
To add living space or storage space
To create an area of your home devoted to a specific purpose, such as a family room, entertainment center, den, master suite, or greenhouse
To free up an existing room in your house for another purpose
To create space you can rent out

Counting the Costs

Once you have articulated your purpose, it’s a good idea to ask yourself whether you could achieve this same purpose without building an addition. An addition takes a lot of work, time, and money. You may be able to make things easier on yourself by exhausting other options first.

You should also check how your projected addition would affect the value of your home and whether you stand a chance of recovering the cost of your addition when selling your home. This will depend both on the type of addition you build and on local market conditions. Talking to a real estate agent will give you some insight.

Finally, you should check with your local building department to see what regulations would apply to your project. This will tell you what building permits you’ll need, what types of drawings you’ll be required to supply, and what contractors you’ll need to hire, which will in turn help you estimate your costs.

Designing Your Project

After counting your costs, if you’ve decided to go ahead with your project, it’s time to get into detailed design. Define in detail what practical functions you intend your addition to serve. Also envision what style you would like for your addition. To help you with these tasks, you can use home design and interior design software, talk to someone at your local home center, or hire a design professional such as an architect or interior designer.

Chief Architect Home Designer Pro 9.0

Planning Your Expansion

As you work through design considerations, you will begin drawing up a detailed blueprint, which will guide you through the planning phase of your project. In this phase you perform a number of essential tasks, including:

Finalizing your drawings
Obtaining building permits
Estimating your costs
Setting a budget
Securing financing
Developing a timetable
Ordering materials
Scheduling contractors

Building Your New Addition

With all this behind you, you can move into actually building your addition. The building process normally proceeds though the following phases:

Demolition of previous structures and erection of new structures
Roughing-in of new plumbing, electrical wiring, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems
Installation of flooring, walling, ceilings, and fixtures
Finishing touches, such as installing doors and woodwork and floor covering, activating plumbing and electrical systems, and installing final fixtures and appliances

This entire process must be closely supervised by a building inspector, who will visit the site during key phases of construction, and will give the final seal of approval when the project is finished.