If you are looking at increasing the living area of your house you are probably looking at one of two options:
- Build a house extension
- Add another story to your house
Which option you choose can depend on:
- City council zoning laws
- Appearance of the House from the Street
- Costs
This web-site has documented a lot of our experiences adding another story to our home. We did this by lifting our house and then enclosing under it. It sounded at the time like the easy option, but as we’ve discovered, there is no such thing as an easy major renovation.
Over at Renovate Queenslander they have started to write about their experiences adding a major extension to their Queenslander in Brisbane, Australia.
Fabie and Warrick have decided to build a large extension onto the back of their Queenslander. They new extension will include a new main bedroom with ensuite, a new kitchen and new large deck and entertaining area. You can read about their extension plans here and and view their plans here.
Building an extension has some advantages over lifting and enclosing under your Queenslander. Here are just a few:
- Doesn’t change the current proportions of the front of your house
- You can build most of the extension with minimum disruption to the rest of the house
- Only minimum work needs to be done on the existing house structure
What other advantages and / or disadvantages do you see with building an extension as apposed to adding a new story to the house?
Our Queenslander already had an extension, it only had two bedrooms, two more were added and a front L shaped hallway as well. Now we are raising, i think having two different floor living spaces is better than extending to get the space instead. The bonus of extending is that the option of raising and building under remains still anyway further down the track!