13 Mar Top 5 Points to Consider When Planning a Room Addition Over Your Garage
One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to gain extra bedroom space is through a garage addition. In fact, putting a second story over garage additions has been a popular decision with homeowners in recent years. Aside from creating a new bedroom space, it can also be a playroom for the kids, a simple entertainment/study room, and so on.
Before you call your contractor about a room addition over your garage, these are the things you need to consider first:
1. Plumbing
It’s possible to build a bathroom above a garage that’s unheated. However, the pipes should stay in places where it’s unheated and they cannot enter exterior walls. This needs much closer coordination among your trusted contractors and plumber to make sure all pipe runs are planned properly. This also avoids reworking.
2. Flooring
Most above-garage additions come with basic frames that weren’t originally created for regular use and heavy foot traffic. This means the first thing you need to do is reinforce your floor joists. Once the reinforcements have been made, insulation can be added next. Doing so allows you to improve noise control and have more control over the temperature.
Here are some tips on how to choose the right type of flooring!
3. Walls
Before remodeling, the first step is to make sure the space is insulated properly, both to keep in line with safety regulations and to help make sure the area is more comfortable for every household member. If your room addition is drafty, you’ll just end up spending more for cooling and heating costs in the long run.
After the insulation in the walls of your room, you may want to use drywall as the base of other treatments you may decide to apply over it. This offers your bonus room a polished look and brings in the same design style as the interior of your main home.
4. Safety Codes
You should address any safety regulations and concerns as early as possible during your bonus room-planning process. There are types of drywall that can help protect the framing against potential fire, for example, so see if you can use those. Drywall penetrations should also be tightly sealed.
5. Home Structure
Once you finally get an idea of what you want, the next step is to think about the structure of your home and how to build on it. An engineer will be the one to verify that the existing framing of the garage can handle the weight of a second story addition.
As for the foundation, it should be strong enough to support that additional room. A contractor will be responsible for digging several holes to check the foundation’s condition, and if it’s deemed unable to support the addition, it can be bolstered with an expensive replacement.
You should expect to encounter a few challenges along the way when having a second story garage addition built – it’s normal. However, if you have the right house in the right neighborhood, the process might be even faster than what you initially expected.
As with all remodeling projects, the cost of the entire addition depends on many factors such as the difficulty of challenges, how much the space affects other parts of the home, and so on.