For many a Houston homeowner, they’re in it for the long run. While some people buy homes with the intention of moving on to something new after a few years, many people have permanence in mind when they sign off on a mortgage, and this has its pros and cons. The upside is stability and freedom — it’s a great feeling, owning a home, knowing that not a single cent more of your income will be burned away to rent. The downside? Well, a home can start to feel stale after a while if you don’t take actions to keep it fresh.
4 Exciting Home Addition Ideas
4 Exciting Home Addition Ideas
At Houston Plans and Permits, we’ve helped countless Houston homeowners to design their dream homes with custom floor plans and house designs. But designing new houses isn’t the only thing we do — we’ve also drawn up plans for all kinds of amazing renovations.
One of the most radical renovations you can make is a home addition. This involves building an entirely new structure and implementing it into your home. It is a hugely ambitious process, but it can breathe new life into your house and give it all kinds of new functionality. Are you considering making an addition to your Houston home? Here are a few ideas to consider:
BUILD A SECOND STORY
This is probably the most ambitious of any home addition ideas, so we’ll start this blog with a bang. If you think adding a second story sounds like a tremendous amount of hard work and expenses, you’re not wrong — it is a massive undertaking in just about every way. But the biggest gambits often yield the greatest rewards, and this is certainly true for second story additions.
There’s nothing that will add more to your home than an entire new floor. And the best part is that if you go through a home floor plan designer like Houston Plans and Permits, you can have complete control over the design of your second story. This is a boon to homeowners who have a unique, creative vision for what they want upstairs.
In most homes, the second story is pretty predictable — it usually consists of a few bedrooms divided by hallways, maybe with a balcony or loft for leisure pursuits. Meanwhile, the open, spacious areas are downstairs. If you design your own second story, however, you don’t have to follow these rules. Perhaps your downstairs is cramped and you want a space upstairs that’s wide open. Maybe you want a room with towering windows that gives you an amazing sunset view. Maybe you want it to be a heavenly mansion for your many cats. But whatever you have in mind, we can design it for you!
EXPAND YOUR KITCHEN
For how much time we spend in the kitchen, a lot of homes sure do have unintuitive designs for this essential space. With normal rooms, you can kind of pick and choose the purpose for most of them, but wherever the kitchen is inside a home, you’re stuck with it. So, for people who have specific preferences, this can come as a bummer.
Many homeowners like having enough room to fit a dining table in their kitchen, but instead have to use a separate room for that. Some people love to cook and prepare food, and they find that their kitchen just isn’t big enough to accommodate all their needs. Some people like to have a giant pantry space, but they have only small cabinets instead.
If you had to compromise on the kitchen when you originally bought your home, now is the time to make things right. We’ve designed many kitchen add-ons. We’ve designed dining nooks, food storage rooms, wine cellars, and much more. Whether it’s a bump out space or a sizable addition to your kitchen that doubles your space, there is no shortage of options. If you can dream it, we can design it!
ENCLOSE YOUR DECK OR PATIO
Decks and patios are nice for outdoor lounging, but they could be so much more. By partially or fully enclosing your deck or patio, you can preserve its basic functionality while also adding something totally new and awesome. For example, do you love taking in the sun on your porch, but you can’t stand being fried by the hot, humid Texas air? Consider converting your porch into a sunroom! This allows you to enjoy things stuff such as cultivating plants and relaxing in the sun, but it also affords benefits like having air conditioning and electricity.
With patios, the same idea applies, only you usually have more room to be creative since patios are typically bigger than porches. Do you love spending time in your backyard but you loathe the presence of mosquitoes and roaches? Having an outdoor living room with spacious windows might be perfect for you. You can enjoy those twilight hours out back with your loved ones, but still enjoy the benefits of being indoors. If you really want the best of both worlds, you can consider enclosing only half of your deck, or adding a new indoor space onto it.
As with most home additions, planning deck and patio additions can be a little dicey since the city of Houston has specific requirements and stipulations. But worry not — if you work with Houston Plans and Permits, we can help you understand which designs are doable, which ones are impossible, and if you settle on something, we can secure the building permit ourselves so that you don’t have to do a thing.
BUILD A BUMP-OUT ADDITION
We briefly touched on this above with kitchen additions, but in a nutshell, bump-out additions are basically cantilevered sections that protrude from the home to add some extra space inside. Bump-outs can be small enough to accommodate little more than a dresser, or they can be large enough to function as an entertainment area — it all depends on your preferences. But if there’s one thing to know about bump-outs, it’s that they’re one of the easiest types of home additions because you don’t have to make major changes to the foundation or roof.
While bump-out designs are relatively simple, it’s still essential to enlist the aid of a house designer to write out the plans — they need to ensure the addition is within city code and that it won’t compromise the structural integrity of your home. If you go through our company, we can design a bump-out addition that’s suited exactly to your wants and needs, and we can secure the permit for you so the job can be done as quickly as possible.
HOUSTON HOUSE PLANS FROM PROFESSIONAL FLOOR PLAN DESIGNERS
If you’re planning a major renovation or addition to your home, you can’t do it without a house floor plan that’s been written to conform to Houston’s building code. While we don’t build the structures that we create plans for, we can help connect you to contractors who can take care of the process. In most situations, it’s more affordable to do the job this way instead of hiring an architect to do the whole thing. Want to get started on your new home addition? Contact Houston Plans and Permits today.