Expanding your family home increases its value, boosts its functionality and may even provide you with a place where to engage in some of your favorite hobbies. For growing families, a home expansion may not even be a matter of choice, seeing as how the privacy of your children needs to be fairly high on your priority list. In some of the above-listed scenarios, a home expansion may be a more frugal alternative to moving to a different place. All in all, here are six creative ideas on how to expand your family home.
1. Screened porch
The first idea worth considering here is to install a screened porch which will serve as a substitute for the living room over the course of the year. Ideally, you could use this area for at least three seasons, seeing as how the lack of insulation and heating system may make the area inaccessible during the winter. The fact that the area is closed off will protect the furniture from various weather occurrences, which will give you the privilege to go with something a tad more expensive. This will also keep the place mosquito and pest free.
2. Installing solar panels
For some, the idea of installing solar panels is out of the question, due to the fact that they fear the costs of such an endeavor. On the other hand, this is an investment that pays itself off, even if it takes 6 to 9 years. Prior to starting this installation, make sure that you have enough roof space (you need roughly 100 square feet of roof space to produce 1kW). You should also make sure that the roof is in a good enough state that you won’t have to remodel it anytime soon. Other than this, looking for government grants may drastically improve your ROI rate.
3. Build another room
What you may need in your home is an additional room, either because you’re expecting to have more children or because you want to build a purpose-specific room like a home office or a gym. If you’re in a particular rush, you can use methods like steel formwork which is a considerably faster and smarter alternative to traditional timber hobs. The reasons why this speeds up the process so much is the fact that these timber hobs are usually made on the spot, whereas steel formwork gets custom-made to fit your specifications and gets delivered, fully formed, to the site.
4. Adding another bathroom
There is probably nothing that affects interpersonal relationships within a household than the number of functional bathrooms. You see, there’s no smarter remodeling idea than adding one more bathroom to the place (regardless if your 3-bedroom home already has 2 of them). It is by far the most logical to make it next to a master bedroom, nonetheless, when it comes to it, any part of the house will do. Therefore, if you aim to expand your current bathroom, you need to keep in mind that this will cost you about one-half of what setting up a new bathroom would.
5. A kitchen expansion
When first planning a kitchen, a lot of people tend to underestimate the amount of space that they’ll need to efficiently move around it. Here, you don’t really have to do anything drastic, seeing as how you just need to find those additional 3 feet of extra space (in every direction). For this, you should build an additional exterior wall just next to your already existing wall. The extra surface that you receive for such a minor project will be disproportionally large and the investment that you have to make to pull it off depends on the scope of the project.
6. Adding a second story
In the end, we come to the most expensive and most complex of all the above-mentioned – adding a second story to your home. First of all, you need to be 100 percent sure that both your foundation and your construction can handle it. Second, you need to be completely sure that you can afford to finish it. Keep in mind that there’s more than just the construction to it, seeing as how this surplus of space now needs to be organized, designed and fully furnished. Of course, this isn’t something that you have to do at once or even right away.
Conclusion
While each of these ideas may be seen as situation-specific, they all result in positive net worth for your home, as well as an improvement in the overall lifestyle for all the inhabitants. For this reason, a home expansion is always a good investment in the long run.