When I bought my house in Berkeley three years ago, I thought it would be years before we needed more space. 2 kids later, we are busting out and needing more space so we have decided to bite the bullet and add on. In this ongoing blog post, I will try to highlight what it takes to do an addition and offer any tips and good stories along the way that I can.
Ideally we would have loved to pop the top. Based on our square footage, and location on our lot, it would have been very expensive and we wouldn't have been able to get more than two bedrooms out of it. So after meeting countless times with our extremely patient architect, Mark Fitzwilliam with Fitzwilliam Architects, we found a design that works and offers all that we need and more.
We will be adding on about 600 square fee to to the back of the home. We will be adding a master bedroom and bath and an office/second living space that should hopefully provide a nice transition from the backyard to the house. It will take up a lot more yard than I was hoping but it will allow us to stay in our home for years to come and stay in our neighborhood which is very important to us.
The process started last summer. We were going to do our kitchen remodel and addition at the same time but with a baby on the way, and it taking 3 months to get city approval of the plans, we decided to the do kitchen first and the addition second. Now that the timing is finally right, we are moving forward. Hopefully we will be done by September and while it will suck to not have our backyard for most of the summer, hopefully by fall we will be moved in and completely finished.
When we bought the house, there was nothing in the backyard but a chain link fence and some really bad grass. I've spent countless hours in the past three years buidling fences, a pergola, patio, planter beds, drip system and bringing the lawn back to life. So while it is exciting to see the project finally underway, it is also a little bittersweet seeing the equipment tear up so much of the work I've done on it. Here are some before and after pictures to give you an idea of what has happened since Tuesday. Hopefully by next week the foundation will be in and in two weeks walls will be going up. Pretty exciting stuff.
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