Buy A Larger House or Add On

When we were first married we bought our first house. It was smaller than what I would have liked, but it was all we could afford. After four years and two children later, we decided we needed more room. On the first floor of our house there was a living room/dining room combination and then a family room/kitchen/eating area combo room, plus a half bathroom. The living/dining area was very big, but the family/kitchen/nook area was pretty tight. It had three distinct areas all in a 20 x 20 foot room. Upstairs there were three bedrooms and two full bathrooms. We felt that we needed a bigger kitchen and a bigger family room, because these are the areas of the house most lived in. We started thinking about moving, but the housing market was not very good at that time, and we would have not made any money on our house, and in fact we would have lost money because of having to pay the realtor fees without have any appreciation of the house value. Plus all of the bigger houses we liked were a little over our price range.

So then we thought about adding a new room on to our house. The first thing we did was make sure that there was enough room in our backyard for this expansion. Luckily we have a pretty good sized backyard, so there was plenty of room to add a new addition, plus still have a decent sized yard. Some homes, especially many of the homes in California, have such small backyards that there is no room for any such building addition. And most property lots have set-back requirements which only allow you to build up to a certain distance near a property line, which can drastically affect your plans for an addition. So you check with your local building/planning department to determine any set-back requirements in order to build on your property. It is also usually listed on the plot plan that you might have received in the legal documents when you purchased your property.

Our next decision was to get an idea of whether or not we would be investing too much money into increasing the size of this house. Would we recoup this money in the event we had to sell our house? We talked to some realtors in the area and they all thought that adding on a new family room and remodeling the existing room into a bigger kitchen was a great idea. They felt that within five years we would recoup all the money we put into this addition and remodel. Also our house was one of the smaller sized units in the subdivision, so adding on would make it more comparable to the other homes in the neighborhood. Sometimes, people already have the largest house in a neighborhood, and an addition may not bring you any additional value when you are already on top. In our case, we were the smaller unit in the group of larger houses, so stepping up to their level was a good investment. That was all we needed to hear. We decided to stay in this house and add on to make it bigger.

The first thing we did was start working on a layout drawing. My husband it a Mechanical Engineer and has a lot of knowledge with AutoCAD drawings, so he was able to do the drawings himself. This saved a ton of money for us, because we did not have to hire an architect. But truth be told, this is a process anybody can learn to do themselves, and we have another article on RemodelMyRoom.com that can help you with this process (Link is Listed Below this Paragraph). We worked on many different layouts until we found the one that worked best for us.