Adding Onto Our Little Apartment

Back in August or September Jan said to me, "I've been thinking.  I know we won't be building our house any time soon.  If we added a room out the back, we could have a real kitchen, get our furniture out of storage (saving $100 a month) and actually have room to have visitors.  How much trouble and expense would that be?" 

I wanted to keep the foot print within the East end wall and the laundry room window on the building side and inside the stone retaining wall on the outside.  That could make it 16 by 19.  I figured a way to build it fast with sips (structural insulated panels) for the walls and roof.  The whole thing with appliances and all could be done for $10,000, I thought.  We told Jason to get us on his schedule to pour the slab.  I set stakes and pulled strings to see exactly what it would look like.  Jan and I got around to actually standing in the space and looking to see how our furniture would fit shortly before Jason was ready to start.  It would not. We quickly realized that the space was just too small to do what we wanted.  So, the project was off.  We would save the money and be happy in our little space.

I was really disappointed that it wasn't going to happen.  The only way the space could be expanded was to the East, past the side of the shop building.  That would put the outside door around the corner facing North;  actually a better thing. And the South East corner would be cut off to fit inside the stone wall.   The foot print would be 16 by 26.  The old plan, using sips, pushed the limit of structural support for the roof, so I did a quick analysis of the costs to build the new plan with conventional framing.  I found out the material cost would be substantial less, although the labor would be much more.  The thing is, I work cheap (for Jan).  I think I can still build the new, bigger plan for the same money.  It will just take longer to build and finish.  It's back on!

 

The floor plan will essentially stay the same except extended to the east.  The kitchen cabinets will line the west wall with an island.

In the 2 weeks around Thanksgiving, Jason and his guys excavated the site, laid a block foundation wall and poured a slab.  I was gone for most of the fun, having been working in Minnesota, then Thanksgiving with my siblings in Bristol, IL, and then to the USEA convention in Texas (all in those 2 weeks).  I did have a couple of days at home in there where I connected the sewer pipe for the new kitchen to the existing main sewer line.  I also got a start on foundation drainage and insulation.  For that, I am installing 2 inch closed cell foam (with borax in the foam to repel pests) on the outside of the block foundation.  This will be covered with cement board to protect it.

 



With the foundation insulated and backfilled, the next step will be to frame the walls and roof.  We know that the kitchen cabinets will run along the West wall and that the center window from the existing wall (that will be removed and the space become the doorway into the new addition) will be installed in the new West wall over the sink.  The window configuration of the other walls is still to be determined.  We have several windows (that we collected and moved from Virginia) that we may use, but we will need a few more.  So, the very next step will be to decide how we want the windows to work in the new space and acquire the ones that we still need.