Planning Your Home Addition - 5 Essential Steps
Preparing for your new home addition is incredibly exciting. You’ve waited so long for the right time to do it, and now that you’re mentally prepared for the disruption - you’re starting to plan.
But what should you include in your plan, exactly? Home makeover shows make it look so easy, but like most things with TV - it’s far from reality.
Without proper planning, you could end up with surprises that complicate the process and leave you feeling overwhelmed. Maybe it’s costing more than you thought, or there are foundational issues to contend with - you can avoid these problems with a solid plan.
Our advice? Put more time into planning your home addition. This way, you won’t end up too deep into your project before realizing your budget or timeline expectations were off - way off.
Here are the key steps you need to follow when planning your home addition to set yourself up for the best chance of success. Follow these, and you’ll have everything you need to put your home addition on the right track.
Hire an architect
You’d never walk into a hospital and tell the doctor what type of surgery or medication you need. A home addition is no different. An architect has the expertise, insight, and experience required to help you identify and meet your goals, and manage your project successfully.
Determine feasibility
In addition to the fun design aspects, your architect will help you with all the boring and complicated legal planning involved in home additions. This includes things like zoning regulations, property covenants, physical limitations, and existing conditions. This red tape can take quite some time to get past, but with the help of an architect, you’ll have peace of mind knowing everything is accounted for.
Set expectations
Outlining your expectations is an integral part of the planning process. Your architect will help you identify what you want to accomplish with your home addition, how you need it to function for your lifestyle, how it should blend with the rest of your home, along with your ideal budgets and timeline. They’ll think of things you won’t, and offer creative solutions to your problems.
Decide on your team
Without collaboration between your architect and construction team, discrepancies will inevitably arise that jeopardize your project. That’s why it’s crucial to build a team early on to help give you the most accurate timeline and cost estimate possible.
Have a plan
Working with an architect gives your construction team the detailed drawings and 3D visualizations they need to carry out the addition flawlessly. Without these, an oversight that leads to your addition being torn down or halted could potentially cost you exponentially more than your architect’s fee.
It’s a financial no-brainer to get them involved from the beginning, and it’s also an opportunity for you to envision your addition and fine-tune everything before it’s built. It’s much easier to make changes on paper that it is in real life!
Need help planning your home addition?
Think of the process just like the actual construction of your home - if you don’t begin with a solid foundation, it doesn’t matter what you do from there; it will probably come crashing down at some point.
Working with an architect is your insurance policy. It’s how you minimize the risk of a costly error ruining your bank balance and dreams of expanding your space.
Though you could try to manage the moving parts yourself, only an architect can offer a degree of security that you’ll stay on budget, on schedule, and get exactly what you’d envisioned.
If you’d like to ensure the success of your home addition, schedule a free consultation today.