Here is the foundation of my latest folly – a 16 X 16′ bedroom addition:
I’ll be the general contractor for it – subbing out the foundation and the framing/roofing but doing the rest myself. This was a nice compromise with my dear wife, so the shell will look done from the outside even if it takes me forever to finish up the inside. We broke ground September of 2005, so you can tell how well I’m doing!
It was quite an undertaking to get the thing to this point. No end of trucks and dust and piles of dirt and gravel. We decided to do the addition as a step down, meaning we were going to put a slab of concrete on the ground and not try to build it up to the same level as the floor next to it – yes we know the floor will be horribly cold. We did this to save money on construction, and it did save us a bundle. In this picture you can see how the addition is connected to the foundation of the house- it will actually cover one of the basement windows up.
All in all, the extra 256 sq ft. will be tremendously useful – we have had a change of heart since the plans were drawn and are making this additional square footage to our existing bedroom (which will function like a den/craft room/exercise room) instead of an additional bedroom. A bit selfish, because we’ll kick our daughter downstairs into a basement bedroom as we knock out the wall between the kitchen and her bedroom to make a bigger kitchen (she’ll live – both my wife and myself had stints in basement bedrooms and neither turned out to be psychopaths, and we’ll remodel it quite cute for her!). This will also make the formal bedroom count of the house down by one to two upstairs bedrooms and two downstairs rooms. The comments have been made that this will make the house much harder to sell. My answer to that is ‘have you seen the house?’. Seriously, being on a busier road, and not having A/C this house has a lot more against it than the number of bedrooms. My belief is that there are plenty of people with only one kid that want a house with no A/c on a busy road with a huge master bedroom (without walk in closets and a private bath – more on that later) and a gourmet kitchen. OK – honestly it’s our house, we have no plans on moving or selling it for the next 10 years, and it makes a heck of a lot more sense to make it meet our needs than to live in a house that doesn’t meet our needs for the possible whims of some future buyer. I mean, we bought this house when it had 20 year old blue shag carpet – hopefully someone out there will be as desperate/stupid as we were when we bought it!