Room Additions

They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. In fact, they are much like people. Room additions can be plain and simple or exceptionally extravagant. I have built small room additions - less than 80 square feet and I have built ones that came close to 2,400 square feet. I'm sure you have seen a variety of room additions yourself. They are as different as snowflakes.

A Huge Undertaking

Constructing a room addition is really the same thing as building a small house. The only problem is that it is much harder. The connection details are tough. Working around people and finished surfaces requires extra care. Dust and utility (electric - plumbing) interruptions must be kept to a minimum. There are many things you have to consider with room additions that never are an issue when you build a new home from scratch. Basically, room additions are a pain in the you-know-what.

The Right Height

One of the most crucial aspects of room additions is making sure the floors meet. I can't tell you how many room additions I have visited where the floors do not line up. There is a hump or a dip. The mistake can usually be traced to a failure of not calculating the foundation height from the point where the "break-through" or "connection" will be. All too often, the contractor will calculate the floor height at a corner or some other obscure point.

The trick is to cut a hole through the side of the existing house exactly where the archway or doorway will be that connects the two rooms. Cut a hole and remove all the exterior wall materials until you can actually see the subfloor or finished floor material inside the house. From here you can then calculate where your top of foundation will be. I always draw a picture and back calculate down to the top of the new foundation.

For example, I determine the thickness of my new finished flooring, the thickness of the subflooring, the floor joist height, the treated lumber foundation sill thickness, and the 1/8 inch for the foam sill sealer! It all adds up.

Wall Heights and Roofs

Do you want the roof line, overhang, gutter board, soffits etc. to match perfectly on the outside? It takes some work for this to happen. For these elements to match, you need to take apart the exterior of upper wall treatments to "see" where the actual finished wall ends and the bottom of the rafters begin.

To make a roof line up you must determine the existing roof pitch, the heel height of the rafters as they pass over the outer edge of the rough building line frame, and the rough overhang depth. It is important to keep in mind the exterior wall treatment of the room addition. If you are not going to match the addition to the existing house, then you must treat the exterior finished walls as the same material. Confused yet? See, I told you building room additions was not for the fainthearted!

Crawl Space Ventilation

A large majority of room additions have crawl spaces. To eliminate moisture problems and dampness, you need to cover the soil in the crawl space with a high performance vapor barrier. I have discussed these in a past column and Builder Bulletin. The clear 6 mil poly you were thinking of using is not high performance! Visit my website for this information.

Heating and Cooling

Are you thinking of simply extending your heating and cooling system into the room addition? Think again! If your original furnace and air conditioner were sized accurately for the original house, I doubt they will provide enough "conditioned" air for the new addition. If you are adding several hundred feet of new floor area, you can count on a significant upgrade of your heating and cooling system. You don't believe me? Then make sure the heating and air conditioning person does a new heat gain and heat loss calculation!

Room additions are a lot of work. Don't underestimate the complexity of this job!

Related Articles:  DIY Room Addition in 7 Weeks, Room Addition Task Timing, Room Addition

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Estimated Time To Complete Specific Tasks

The following is a listing of many planning and construction aspects that are involved in the construction of a typical room addition. If you plan to tackle a room addition project you will be involved in virtually all of the following tasks in one way or another.

I've taken the liberty to group some tasks together and others are broken down into sub groups. There are actually hundreds of individual "things" that have to be done.

Average Times

I researched my past records and averaged the times. Not all room additions are alike. The times shown below are for a 400 square foot single story addition with moderate access.

CLICK HERE to get FREE & FAST BIDS from local contractors who build room additions.

This means materials have to be hand carried from the front of the house to the rear. The below estimations also include a close approximation of the man/woman hours it may take to complete the listed task.

First Timers

If you plan to do things for the first time, be sure to add additional time. Your room addition project may not include some of the listed tasks. If it doesn't, be sure to substitute things that may take the place of a listed task. You will be surprised how time seems to disappear each day.

The numbers also include the amount of time it takes to estimate, order, pickup, transport, and unload the necessary materials. This running time can be enormous.

CLICK HERE to get FREE & FAST BIDS from local contractors who build room additions.

Thinking Time

Don't forget to include "thinking" time. What is this? This is when you will stop all work and scratch your head wondering if you are doing something right.

It happens on all jobs. Sometimes it may take an hour or two to determine the best way to solve a problem. This isn't wasted time, just "thought" time!

CLICK HERE to get FREE & FAST BIDS from local contractors who build room additions.

Related Articles:  DIY Room Addition in 7 Weeks, Room Additions, Room Addition

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Can you imagine what life was like just 100 years ago? There were still many houses that didn't have real indoor plumbing and most definitely multiple bathrooms. I know this for a fact because I purchased a 10 unit apartment building just 15 years ago that still had hallway toilets shared by two apartments!

If you do research about plumbing and plumbers, you will quickly find out that approximately 100 to 125 years ago plumbers were considered as knowledgeable and revered as medical doctors. Plumbers were responsible for maintaining public health by minimizing the spread of disease. They achieved this by implementing innovative changes in how people got clean drinking water and disposed of both grey and black waste water. Bathrooms were part of this radical change in how people lived. To say the very least, bathrooms are very much taken for granted in today's world. If you are fortunate and have a very elderly relative, ask them what it was like when they were a kid!

Tight Schedules

I have remodeled many a bathroom in my day. It is a stressful job for all involved. If the family doesn't have alternative bathroom facilities in the house, you often have to create temporary ones, even if that means a Portolet in the driveway! Creating a temporary shower in a garage or basement is easy. It is the toilet that causes problems.

I have turned a bathroom around in as little as five days This was a total gut job and it took every bit of skill and planning to make the job happen that fast. I am sure it can be done faster, but much of the work I did myself with one helper. Heck, I have seen entire homes built in a day, so I am sure a group of real pros can do a bathroom from start to finish in 12 hours or less!

Paying a Pro

If you are going to have your bathroom remodeled, you might want to pay attention to how the contractor gets paid. One of the biggest problems I see, based upon stories told to me by folks like you, is that people tend to pay the contractor in advance for work yet to be performed.

Read the following language I have extracted from one of my handy Checklist products. See if it doesn't make sense to you:

"Excessive advance or periodic payments before or during the work is completed often put a homeowner at risk. The homeowner basically becomes a lender. This is especially true if the job does not require any special or custom ordered materials at the beginning of the job. A fair payment schedule is one that allows the homeowner to pay only for labor and material that has been completed in a satisfactory manner. Periodic payments can occur every three to four days for small jobs or each week or month for large jobs. On large jobs, the amount of money paid out at any given time should not exceed the total sum of the items listed in the above cost breakdown plus a proportionate amount of contractors overhead and profit for completed in-place work. A homeowner should not have to pay full price for work that is unsatisfactory or incomplete. Do you agree with this philosophy? Yes _____ No ____ If "Yes", please complete the Payment Schedule below:"

I think you get the point. Protect yourself by making sure you always have enough money to finish the job in case the contractor disappears.

Permitted Payments

Some jobs do require some advance payments. Perhaps your bathroom job will have custom-ordered cabinets, tops, plumbing fixtures, tile, marble, granite, etc. It is unfair for the remodeler to advance his own money to pay for these materials or to pay for the required good faith payment the fabricators request. If you feel uncomfortable giving the money to the contractor, ask if you can make the check a two party check or even pay the fabricator directly. If you need to do this, it is a danger signal - meaning the bridge of trust between you and the contractor is not yet complete. Trust is important in every relationship, especially building and remodeling!

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25 Must-Do Bathroom Construction Tips

1. Plans - If you are fortunate and are in the design phase of building or remodeling, consider making your bathroom a little bigger. You would be surprised what an extra foot in width and length will do for you.

2. Framing - Bathrooms need studs at weird places. And they also need studs to be out of the way of critical elements. Place double studs at the centerline of a shower door frame or track. Place the CENTER of a wall stud cavity at the centerline of the tub and shower faucet. Frame recessed medicine cabinets at the right height.

3. Blocking - Don't throw scrap framing material away. You can use it to create solid fastening locations for towel bars, toilet paper holders and grab bars in bath and shower areas.

4. Quiet Piping - If your bathroom is going to be on a second floor, consider using quiet cast iron drain pipes. Plastic drain lines are very noisy. Save the plastic for the vent lines.

5. Water Flow - Do you want a high volume of water to flow from all fixtures? Make sure that you extend 3/4 inch diameter hot and cold piping to the bathroom and branch off this size pipe with 1/2 inch lines to serve each feature.

6. Hot Water NOW! - Tired of waiting for hot water? Install a hot water recirculating loop. If this is a major remodel or a new house, it is simple. See my website for this past column and bulletin!

7. Ventilation - Bathroom fans need to be sized to the room. Make sure you buy a powerful fan and use solid metal exhaust piping, NOT flexible plastic pipe!

8. Skylights - If you can work one in do it. Make sure it has a ventilation flap you can open to minimize condensation or get hot moist air to flow outdoors. Buy the most expensive soft coat Low-E glass you can for this unit.

9. Electric - If this is a remodel job, by all means extend a new 20 amp circuit to the bathroom for a new GFCI receptacle. Hair dryers, electric curlers, etc. need power and lots of it.

10. Indirect Lighting - Think out of the box if you want dramatic lighting in your bathroom.

11. Cement Board - Forget about using water resistant drywall behind tile. If you want the tile to stay up forever, you must use cement board.

12. Vapor Barriers - Vapor barriers in the walls of a bathroom are a must. Be sure you install at least 4 mil plastic.

13. Steam - Now is the time to consider a steam generation unit. They must be installed right!

14. Sound - Some people get up before others. Insulate the walls of the bathroom with sound batts to minimize noise transmission to other parts of the house.

15. Access - Old houses often had access panels for tubs. Try to do the same so you can get to all of the tub plumbing.

16. Toilet Space - Create a space at least 36 inches wide for your toilet. Who wants to bump elbows into cabinets and walls?

17. Shower Shelves - If you are doing tile in your shower, you can get nice marble corner or end wall shelves for shampoo and other body care products.

18. Multiple Shower Heads - On more than one occasion, I have installed multiple faucets or shower heads in bathrooms. The big faucet companies have expensive faucets and body washing systems if you just won the lottery.

19. Heated Towel Bars - Need I say more?

20. Heated Tile Floors - You can buy electric mats that are installed under ceramic floors to keep them warm.

21. Tall People - Most vanities are short. Consider installing kitchen sized cabinets to prevent stooping.

22. Laundry Chute - Now is the time to do it, if you can make it work.

23. Heat Lamp - For those of you who want to be cozy after a shower.

24. Storage - Install a wall cabinet over the toilet!

25. Mirrors - They make small rooms seem big.

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