We have a 11 year-old, 2035 square foot house with 4 bedrooms - one is used as the computer room and the guest room doubles as the video game room for the boy. Since Austin is built on 2” of dirt over 1000’ of bedrock, nobody has a basement.  This means nobody has any storage space either, so people generally use a bedroom or their garage. This means you either lose use of a bedroom or the cars are permanently parked in the driveway.

We are thinking of building on to the back of our house, to add one or two rooms for storage and a family/teenager room. I downloaded a 30-day free trial copy of AutoDesk Architectural Studio and drew the following designs.  It’s a pretty good program for whipping up visualizations like this, but it definitely has its quirks!  I’ve made the roofs semi-transparent to show the walls underneath.

• House layout as it currently exists
• Extending the reading (dining) room to create a new 12’x14’ room
• Adding the new room off the reading room, plus adding a new 13’ x 16’ room in the open center area
• Adding the new room off the reading room, plus adding a new 17’ x 16’ room in the open center area but with no hallway
• Adding the new room off the reading room, plus adding a new 13’ x 20’ room in the open center area

I spoke with a few builders at the last Austin Home and Garden show and they all said adding a small room has enormous fixed overhead so it’s more cost-effective per square foot to add as much space as you can fit. Houses in my area are running about $85 per square foot  so the cost of any added space will likely break even with the price when we sell the house.

Since I’m pretty handy with a hammer, I plan to do as much of the work as I can myself.  I’ll leave the final design to an engineer, pouring the concrete slab to a contractor and use fabricated roof joists but I think I can handle everything else. It’s a good dream, we’ll see how it turns out.