So with a little help here and there I built an addition to our modest home. The house is a 1960 ranch with 3 beds and 1 bath. The hall bath is small and cramped and after my wife moved in it became clearly obvious that the house was in desperate need of a second bath. It would only get worse when her parents, who live about 3 hours away, would come to town for weekend visits. Compounding space needs were all her clothes and things; the house did not have much for closet space. The house is situated back fairly far from the road and at an angle that made it favorable to expand right out the front of the house on the end where the largest bedroom is. It always looked so long and low with the attached garage that adding some character to the front would be nice.
I tried to do everything pretty high quality considering most of the stuff I had never actually done before formally for new construction. I went with 2x6 exterior walls for better strength and thicker insulation, high quality low-E windows, lots of receptacles everywhere (including in the closet and water closet), added much needed receptacles outside on both sides as well as water spigots (including a hot water spigot on one side!). I did get "turnkey" quotes for the work but the prices per square foot ranged from 2.5X to 3X what I can sell it for in this market...not to mention the quotes were way over my budget.
The entire job took 3 years and 2 months, I only hired out one thing, and we were able to continue to use the bedroom the entire duration of the project which was a feat in of itself.
A few concepts were sketched up; I do not remember what online tool I used for the below but this turned into the design to build. 216 square feet total with a water closet, walk-in shower, soaker tub, double vanity, and a decent sized closet. Imagine the top of the picture is the outside of the house and the bottom is adjoining the original exterior wall of the house. It would delete the small window, add a large bay window, transom windows on the sides, and add two interior doors to that wall in the bedroom. My wife named the water closet...
Original exterior wall inside the bedroom:
The house is on a slab so the addition required extending the slab. Long story short the contractor I hired for this portion was not great but got the job done with some cajoling, the weather was terrible right after breaking ground in December 2017 (sub freezing for weeks plus snow) so the slab did not get poured until the end of January 2018. I did the underground plumbing after they excavated but before the concrete pour.
The slab has a 16 OC #4 rebar reinforcement instead of mesh. The slight additional cost was worth in in my opinion.
Then the walls started going up after my stacks of lumber arrived. My wife helped quite a bit with the framing. Due to the slow pace I had to notch the existing roof and do a lot of work to keep the house weather-tight.
Hindsight being what it is I ordered the bay window too early so in mid-March I had to get some help to install it and go ahead and cover it up (I had no where to store it otherwise.) The window sat covered for a really long time.
To tie into the roof I went with a gable profile like is on the garage. I built the addition roof structure first (again with my wife's help) then took a week's vacation to strip and merge the roof lines together. It had a FEMA roof (blue tarps) for a while while everything was in progress.
Continued on next post.
I tried to do everything pretty high quality considering most of the stuff I had never actually done before formally for new construction. I went with 2x6 exterior walls for better strength and thicker insulation, high quality low-E windows, lots of receptacles everywhere (including in the closet and water closet), added much needed receptacles outside on both sides as well as water spigots (including a hot water spigot on one side!). I did get "turnkey" quotes for the work but the prices per square foot ranged from 2.5X to 3X what I can sell it for in this market...not to mention the quotes were way over my budget.
The entire job took 3 years and 2 months, I only hired out one thing, and we were able to continue to use the bedroom the entire duration of the project which was a feat in of itself.
A few concepts were sketched up; I do not remember what online tool I used for the below but this turned into the design to build. 216 square feet total with a water closet, walk-in shower, soaker tub, double vanity, and a decent sized closet. Imagine the top of the picture is the outside of the house and the bottom is adjoining the original exterior wall of the house. It would delete the small window, add a large bay window, transom windows on the sides, and add two interior doors to that wall in the bedroom. My wife named the water closet...
Original exterior wall inside the bedroom:
The house is on a slab so the addition required extending the slab. Long story short the contractor I hired for this portion was not great but got the job done with some cajoling, the weather was terrible right after breaking ground in December 2017 (sub freezing for weeks plus snow) so the slab did not get poured until the end of January 2018. I did the underground plumbing after they excavated but before the concrete pour.
The slab has a 16 OC #4 rebar reinforcement instead of mesh. The slight additional cost was worth in in my opinion.
Then the walls started going up after my stacks of lumber arrived. My wife helped quite a bit with the framing. Due to the slow pace I had to notch the existing roof and do a lot of work to keep the house weather-tight.
Hindsight being what it is I ordered the bay window too early so in mid-March I had to get some help to install it and go ahead and cover it up (I had no where to store it otherwise.) The window sat covered for a really long time.
To tie into the roof I went with a gable profile like is on the garage. I built the addition roof structure first (again with my wife's help) then took a week's vacation to strip and merge the roof lines together. It had a FEMA roof (blue tarps) for a while while everything was in progress.
Continued on next post.
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