Adding a Room to Your Home
Adding a room to your southern California home is a much larger project than simply remodeling existing parts of your house, since it will require you to rip out part of your wall and make other structural changes. The process gets even more complicated if you wish to add a second story to the house. However, if you desire a room addition, the following advice should help you implement it correctly and efficiently.
Before you even start, you should decide what purpose the room will serve. Do you want it to be an extra bedroom or guest room, a home office, etc.? You should make these decisions at the beginning to aid the design process. If you build it as a bedroom, but later decide that you want to turn the room into a work room that will require more cabinets or a different type of flooring, then you are just setting yourself up for another project and more expenses.
A second story addition will require more preparation work than grafting a room addition for the first floor.
o Before you decide to go ahead with the story addition, you will have to find out whether or not your house can even support another story. This will require an inspection by a structural engineer to determine if the house’s foundation can withstand the addition of another floor. The amount of stories a structure can support will be determined by the original layout of the house.
o If the structural engineer decides that your foundation can support a second floor, then you may begin the story addition. First, the foundation will have to be expanded. You will have to dig a one foot by one foot by two feet footer. After that, you have to add a compacted interior of sand (six inches) and a layer of concrete (three-and-a-half to four inches). This will create the base from which to expand.
You might want to consider contracting with a design/build company to take care of your room addition or second story addition. Without a design/build company, you will have to work with several different companies or specialists to get the job done. You will need an architect, a contractor, the actual workers, and a structural engineer for inspections. If you contract a design/build company, they will provide all these things, simplifying the process significantly while simultaneously cutting costs.
Ah, the end of the year. Time for reflection, resolutions, and recaps. 2011 was a busy year for lighting news