An Introduction
This is the ongoing story of what we are doing to our house.
Follow along as our 1910 bungalow gets an addition and some much-needed rehabilitation after a long period of benign neglect. Here it is in Google Street View in April 2014, a few months before we bought it in September of 2014.
So let me tell you about our little project here. Planning for the addition to our house began with the following brief:
Rehabilitate the sad and run-down exterior
Add a main bedroom and dedicated bath to the two-bedroom house (about which there’s more in this post).
Provide access to the back yard from the kitchen to integrate the back yard into the life of the house.
Limit the cost to something that made sense for our budget while adding enough value to the house to make it worthwhile when we sell it someday (i.e., I guess, don’t overbuild or underbuild for the cost).
Meet the City’s design guidelines for the historic district and the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation.
When all of this started WAY back in May, 2017 (I can hardly type that—where has the time gone!?), we interviewed three architects and decided to go with a slightly larger firm (i.e., not a sole practitioner) that I already knew through my job; I knew the firm’s owner personally as well. We had them develop two preliminary schemes: a one-story addition and a two-story addition that would meet the project’s objectives, and from there we would decide which way to go.
The one-story scheme met our needs and even included a family room, but it had an uncomfortably long hallway that seemed like a lot of wasted space, and it extended too far into the back yard. The lot is roughly 8,000 square feet, and much of the back yard is occupied by a 20’ x 30’ garage that was built in 1997, so lot coverage is an issue.
The two-story addition that we decided to pursue (at that time) proposed a second story at the rear of the house (to maintain the impression of a one-story bungalow at the street, a scheme commonly seen in the neighborhood), resulting in construction of an enlarged kitchen, staircase, powder room, upstairs hall, and two additional bedrooms (main bedroom and a small one for guest/office) in roughly 850 additional square feet. After a year of getting through the approvals and even plan check with this proposal, we decided that the scheme was too costly and too invasive to proceed, given the cost of construction balanced with our desire for a certain level of quality. We did not want to crush our little bungalow, and it was starting to look too unwieldy and risky.
We could have started construction in the beginning of 2020, but late in 2019 I had misgivings about it. Yes, we would have ended up with a great project, but it started to feel like too much. I started sketching the simplest possible one-story alternative, and surreptitiously passed it to a friend who’s an architect for her review and suggestions. She made a few refinements and we had a completely plausible one-story schematic plan that I kept in my metaphorical back pocket.
Time passed. January 2020 turned into March of 2020, and we all know what that means. Well, first, it meant that I came down with COVID-19 symptoms on March 14 (sure, it’s all flu-like symptoms till someone loses their sense of smell!). Then, as I started to recover, I felt emboldened to appeal to my partner in crime for the wisdom of scaling things back dramatically. Remember that one-story plan sketch? What about that? We got on the phone with our trusted realtors/friends, who had been a bit underworked over the previous few weeks, and they sprung into action to evaluate the comparable sales and apply their wisdom.
“YOU GUYS SHOULD JUST MOVE” was their recommendation.
YES, we should just move. Adding on to a 110 year old house is no one’s idea of a quick and tidy solution to being short a bedroom. But sales in this neighborhood are far too rare and competitive to have any choices. There just isn’t anywhere to move to, and any place that comes on the market in our price range is well out of range by the time the hungry flock of buyers descends on it. We’ve been there. Our house has probably appreciated 40% since we bought it in late 2014, six and a half years ago. YIKES. I know. No good choices. They saw our point. Addition it is, and small addition is better than overly-ambitious addition—their analysis and gut feeling agreed with ours.
The two plans below show the house as it was when we bought it (above) and how I started to think through how to add on a simple bedroom and bath while still keeping the kitchen connected to the back yard. (Note that the garage is farther back from than house than indicated in the second plan, but it helps you understand why we couldn’t just extend the bedroom wing, which would have given us everything we wanted…sigh.)
We called back our architects and said we wanted to start all over again from the point of my sketch. Now it’s a year and a half later—August 2021—and construction is about to start!
The house as it was in 2014 when we purchased it.
This was my crude sketch plan from late 2019. The main changes are an additional wing behind the kitchen to add a main bedroom and bathroom and the reconfiguration of the kitchen to incorporate the space of the service porch and the second bath (which was built in the 1990s out of space from the original 2nd toilet and some of the adjacent bedroom closets). The bedroom closets get combined into a new hallway to access both bedrooms.