What To Know If You Want To Build a Home Addition

Even if you own your home and love living there, the house you bought five, 10 or more years ago might not be perfectly suited to your needs in 2021. If you don't want to move, there's another option available to you: Building an addition onto your current home.

As you might imagine, this is a big undertaking that can be quite disruptive to your everyday life before, during or even after construction. You'll need to consider a number of issues before you go forward, including the following:

1) It costs a considerable amount

As with any other home improvement project, you will have to dole out a fairly large sum to finance the work that goes into an addition. Home Advisor notes that the average project typically costs in the neighborhood of $40,000 or more.

While every project is different, you shouldn't expect to spend less than $15,000 or so on the effort, and even on the lower end, you should probably budget for more, just in case of cost overruns.

Building an addition on your home can make it more functional, but don't make the decision lightly.

2) It takes careful planning

Especially if your addition is going to affect the floorplan of your current home (that is, if it's a pure addition and not just building a living space into an attic or basement), you need to design everything carefully. That not only means making the space feel like a natural extension of your home but keeping it from getting too close to the property line or affecting the structural integrity of your house.

3) The local government needs to know about it

As with any other construction project, a home addition requires permits and permissions before and during the construction phase and an inspection when it's completed, according to Your Own Architect. Every city or town has its own rules and requirements on this front, so make sure you know what you'll need to be in compliance.

4) You have to know what it's for

There are plenty of different reasons why you would want to build an addition to your home, but some of them might not make sense financially.

For instance, if you are building it specifically to boost your property's value, you have to understand what kind of return it might provide. In many such cases, you won't recoup a large percentage of that investment , HGTV says. In fact, you might have to live as long as five more years in your home for the investment to really be "worth it" from a financial perspective.

On the other hand, if you just want an addition to make your home more livable, that's usually a good reason to go through with the project.

If you don't have the tens of thousands of dollars necessary to build an addition sitting in savings right now, you have other options to finance* such a home improvement project. Get in touch with the local representatives at Vectra Bank today to learn more about cash-out refinancing, home equity loans and more, so you can have the full picture of the opportunities available to you.

^{*Credit approval required. Terms and conditions apply. See banker for details. Equal Housing Lender. NMLS #467014}