Our home addition

By jelly | October 23, 2007

We are currently in the process of doing a large, double the size of our existing, addition onto our home. It hasn’t been a nightmare like some people have experienced where they have bad workmanship and alike but i have learned alot of things which I feel I should share. If you do plan any kind of renovation, or addition on your house please read this. If you follow these very easy tips then it should save you a lot of headache when it comes to completing it. Everything I will mention in this should commonsense, and nothing is brain surgery but none of it occured to us.

When planning an addition tip #1

Get the designer to list every finish on the print. Have them call out all flooring options, lighting options, hardware options.

What does this help prevent:

It means that every builder that quotes on the project will be working on the same assumption. So you arn’t comparing quotation #1 which has a $10/sqf hardware cost with quotation #3 which has a $2/sqf hardware cost that you are going to have to go over budget on.
It eliminates the builder saying ‘The print looks like its using this kind of door so thats what I ordered’
It eliminates the builder saying ‘If you want that floor we are going to have to increase the dollars on that project and you are going to have to skimp on something else to get that to work’
It eliminates the building saying ‘We are delayed because the lead time on that stone is 3 weeks, I budgeted a different stone which we could have in 1 week.’ so now no one is on site for 2 weeks while we wait for your stone.