No, I’m not pregnant. Did I fool you for a second? This post is about an addition we’re adding to our home … sometime in the yet-to-be-determined future. As in, we’re just dreaming for now.
Our mid-century (1955) ranch is 1420 square feet. Plenty of room for two people. Plenty of room for two people who frequently work from home, even. It’s a 3-bedroom, 2 full-bath home* which allows us to have a comfortable master suite, a music studio for Jason and an office/craft room for me. (*Originally it was 3-bedrooms, 1 full-bath and a den.) The only problem is that we want to have kids. And we don’t want to move. Ever. We love our house and our garden and our neighborhood that much. Our lot is .36 acres and our house is average size for the neighborhood so there is justification for an addition. Commence daydreams of building on.
Commence? What am I saying. We’ve lived here 3.5 years and we’ve been talking about where and how and what we could build for 3.5 years. Just recently though, Jason was talking to one of our friends who is an excellent carpenter/handyman about some possibilities and suggestions. JB said, “If I was y’all I’d build off the front. You have a big front yard.” Jason heard less grass to mow. Current home layout:
We had never considered that. All of our previous ideas were to build off the back, near the driveway. A few days ago I had time to draw some sketches of how we could make it work. I love drawing out floor plans. Am I weird? I used to do this all the time when I was a kid … drawing out my dream house or the house of the made up family I was writing a story about.
The first sketch is the simplest solution – cut off 1/3 of my 11’x10′ office to create a hallway and add two modest size bedrooms with closets. My office could even be further cut down to say … 6’x6′ to create a playroom area or a reading nook or something. Total addition: approx. 300 sq. ft.
The second sketch takes the same idea but shoves it further from the existing house to create a den or study area and possibly an enclosed outdoor courtyard area off of the master bedroom. An enclosed outdoor living space is a little fantasy of ours. Total addition: approx: 500 sq. ft.
I showed Jason my sketches and he loves the second one. Sweet! Let’s do it! Oh wait, we don’t have kids. We don’t have $50,000 lying around. That’s OK. For now, I’ll just map these out in Illustrator.
What do you think? Do you have experience with adding on to your home? Would our house lose it’s ranchiness if we had an addition that made it L-shaped (or gun shaped)? We don’t have room on our property to expand on either side. This box I added on the tax assessment schematic shows it would be about 26’x20′ for the larger of the 2 addition plans:
I wonder how much these plans will change in the next … oh … 7 years or so.
Posted by mahlbrandt 
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