Has anyone done an addition lately?

DH and I are at a point where we need to make a decision as to what we do with out home. We live in NJ. Our house is crowded right now. And before we have another child we need more space.

We live in a great location in NJ. Good school district. Close to all major highways. Convienient for where we work. Wonderful neighbors. I'll be honest, I love living here. I can cry just thinking about leaving.

We do have the option to extend the house. I'm just not sure of how expesive that is going to be though. I mean really, I have NO IDEA the ball park price of an extension. Does anyone have an estimate on price/square foot?

I know if we go this route it will be a PITA. But I'm not sure that we could even sell right now in this environment.

Any advice? Where do we start? How much can we expect? Tips? Anything? I have no idea what to do.

TIA.

Re: Has anyone done an addition lately?

The biggest factors in price are: Are you adding out or up? Will there be plumbing in the new addition? If you expand the house footprint, you need a foundation (basement, slab, etc), and you may need a variance from the town depending on how big you want to go. However, if you go up, you may need to strengthen the first floor to support the 2nd floor.

I would start with some rough drawings, and have a contractor come by and give you an estimate. If it's within your budget, then hire an architect to make official drawings. Once you have the architectural drawings, you can call a few contractors in to get better estimates.

Most of the contractors I talked with don't like to give a price/sq foot, since there are so many factors that make the number almost useless.

Re: Has anyone done an addition lately?

we priced out a slab extension family room - 15x20 no bathroom and it was about $30K.

about 7K of that was to grade the yard and do the foundation.

Re: Has anyone done an addition lately?

We're just finishing up an addition- we put on a family room (18x20) and a laundry room/mud room with bathroom. We put a full basement under it. DH is doing all the trim/painting himself plus doing the wood floors and he GC'd the whole project. It cost about $75k. We started in mid-March and it's almost done because the contractors didn't have a lot of work and were very flexible. If you're going to do it, now is a great time. We re-fi'd into a low rate and got some great prices from the contractors. Sure it's been annoying, but I'm glad we did it.

Re: Has anyone done an addition lately?

i have lofty ideas on my head but they involve adding to the footprint. I want to go back and to the side. Basically putting on a two car garage and then a master bedroom and bathroom over top of it. Then adding a family room to the back with an additional bedroom/closet/possibly laundry room over it. I think i'll call around like you suggested and see what we're looking at. I have a feeling it will definately be out of our budget but I don't think I'll be able to let the idea go until I at least price it out.

Thanks