One home improvement project many people dream of someday tackling is a home expansion. While you can probably imagine all the ways you would want to use this extra space, actually completing the project can be extremely challenging. If you want to avoid many of the pitfalls, you must plan ahead. Below are some tips for making the project easier.
Obtain Permission for the Expansion
While you may assume that you can add whatever you want to your house because you are the owner, this may not be the case. Instead, you may have to gain a permit from your local municipal office. In certain cases, you won’t need a permit. However, you better check. If you go ahead with such an expansion project without approval, you may run into trouble in the future especially with selling your home. Things that may require permission include projects that increase the height of your home, extend it closer to the road, increase the size of your house over half of your land, use materials that don’t match your existing architecture and more.
Use Prefabricated Materials
Home building is an extremely complex and laborious process. Especially if you’re doing things like using wall frames for your home. If you want to directly manage the entire project, you are better off taking certain shortcuts that eliminate the amount of work and problems you are likely to encounter during the expansion. This should include ordering prefabricated materials instead of building them up from scratch. One excellent choice is to invest in prefabricated wall frames. The wall frames can be designed, delivered, and installed directly on the site of the construction.
Stick to a Final Blueprint and Budget
One mistake many homeowners make is allowing such an expansion project to literally grow out of control. They continuously add things to the project during construction. That can create budget overruns, and it can cause the timeline for completion to keep stretching onward far into the future. Instead, before you even “break ground” on such an expansion, you must settle on a final blueprint. This will prevent you from changing course mid-project. Also create a budget and try to stick to it. While it may be hard to do so, one of the biggest problems with such projects is the costs often balloon well past what the homeowner thought they would be.
While it can be fun imagining what you will do with the extra space from an expanded home, such a project can easily turn into a nightmare. To avoid problems, take steps like gaining the proper permission from local authorities, using prefabricated materials and sticking to a final blueprint and budget. You’ll be happy you did so.
