How to Add a Room to Your Home
Every homeowner will tell you that they need more space than they did when they first bought a home. That’s the nature of family life and of being a homeowner. Once this problem becomes too much, you should consider adding a family room.
This isn’t a small construction project but with proper planning, it can be done without disturbing your family life too much. The key is to have most of the addition pre-made so that the construction is done off-site.
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Location
The first thing to decide on is where the new family room will be located in relations to your home as it is. The most common options are to add a floor or to create a bump-out room. Both require major construction and you might even need to find a place to live until the work is done.
However, there are less messy options as well. If you have an auxiliary room such as a garage or basement you don’t use, that’s the perfect place to add a new family room. In some case, these aren’t always suited to be occupied full-time and they might require more work than you think.
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Plan ahead
The goal is to minimize the amount of work that needs to be done on-site and thus make the construction process easier on the occupants of the existing home. This starts by knowing what you want, both in terms of the size of the room and its use.
Once you know that, it will be easier to arrange for prefabricated steel formwork that will be assembled off-site and significantly cut down the time spent waiting for the concrete to dry and for the addition to be useable.
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Connecting to the grid
It’s also important to decide on how to provide power for your additional room. The simplest way is to connect the room to your home and to use the same grid as you’re using already. However, this isn’t always the most energy-efficient option.
With an additional room, you get a chance to overhaul your energy consumption. If it’s in any way possible, you should power this additional room separately and use solar panels to do so. This is especially easy to accomplish if you’re adding a bump-out or converting an auxiliary room.
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Design
The goal with an additional family room is for it to naturally feel as if it was a part of the home all along. This is best accomplished by making sure that it’s designed with the same aesthetic and the same theme in mind. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment a bit as you would with any other room, but you don’t want to go overboard.
The biggest part of this is probably the color palette and the patterns you choose. With these, there’s a lot of chance to improvise and showcase your creativity while still remaining within the design theme of your home.
Adding a room to your home isn’t a small task and it will require a construction project to last a few weeks at least. However, if you plan ahead and use prefabricated parts, you can make it easier on your family. Depending on how much space you have in your yard, it can be done as a bump-out or by modifying your garage or basement.
