You might need that home extension because your family is growing or you are planning to construct guest rooms for overnight parties with family or friends. However, not everyone knows how to go about it. This explains why so many home extension projects need to be done over or even scrapped for a new building team to come in to start from scratch.
If you never thought you would eventually wind up needing a home extension but yes, you do now, no worries. This article summarizes six (6) common mistakes that you can avoid when you start your home extension project.
1. Starting a Project Without Planning
Although it sounds commonsensical to sit down and start jotting down questions regarding your home extension project, you might be surprised that there are people who don’t do this.
Instead, they start calling up builders and architects right away and accept bid offers. You need to go into a home extension project with caution because the entire project can become quite complicated very, very fast.
2. Sketching Their Home Extension By Themselves
At the very start, when you are sketching the appearance of your home extension and you feel that you definitely need help from a professional, you can choose to contact either a draftsman and an architect to render an appropriate perspective plan for you. This is necessary if your rough sketch does not give the right measurements of parts of the home extension. If the parts are not measured and drawn to scale correctly, at the end of the project, you might find that your actual home extension results are not up to scale or standards.
3. Insufficient Home Extension Budget Estimate
Your home extension budget is very important because you want to prevent excessive costs. You might also need to factor in where you will get this home extension budget from. You may have some money in the bank, but you shouldn’t touch that as much as possible. On the other hand, if you find that it is absolutely necessary, you might take out a bank loan to pay for the costs of your home extension project. Either way, you don’t want to run out of money before the project is completed.
When creating a budget estimate, consider the location, size of the home extension, and your specifications for the finished project. It also helps to figure out whether you want a single-story extension or a two-story extension because there will be additional costs, particularly if you need to build a solid foundation for a two-story project.
4. Ignoring Government Fees and Regulations
You will need to factor in any fees and regulations set by the government because these may be sizable. To find out what these fees are, you can as for help from the architect and the structural engineer you hired. If they have the necessary experience, they will be able to estimate for you the state fees that you will have to pay to have your home extension.
You will also have to find out if there are any government regulations, local state laws, and even neighborhood rules that you need to comply with, particularly those related to building home extensions, noise, curb appeal, ditches, diggings, as well as gas, water, and power connections.
5. Choosing a Builder You Don’t Know
It is quite important to go through the builder selection process in a methodical manner because there are many considerations to factor in. For instance, you need to ask questions such as the credentials of each builder, the size of their current team, their rate for a home extension building project, and home extension projects they’ve done before.
Some homeowners prefer to find their builder through social contacts but others may go through builder websites instead. You should go through a set of interview questions point by point and record the answers. After you have gone through your shortlist of candidate builders, you can then make a choice.
6. Overlooking Effects on the Existing Structure
The existing structure (meaning, the home you are living in now) has to be taken into account when you plant to have some home extensions. This becomes very important if some parts of your existing structure will be shared by the home extension, such as walls and posts.
To avoid nasty accidents, you will need your architect and your chosen builder to determine how to shore up any parts of the existing structure that might be burdened with the parts of your home extension.
Takeaways
The first time to plan a home extension can be a bit overwhelming. However, if you begin the planning stage in the right way, you can avoid costly mistakes later as well as penalties from government or local agencies for building home extensions the wrong way. The six (6) home extension project tips summarized in this article can help you to a methodical start for a better-finished project.
