When you look at the cost of moving into a bigger home, as well as the hassle, it is often a much better idea to extend your home instead. If you need more space but do not have the budget to buy a bigger house, then extending your home is the cheaper alternative that can also cause less disruption as your address stays the same, the kids can stay in the same school, and you do not have to worry about moving your furniture and other belongings. Below are some of the different factors that you need to consider when you start planning an extension to your home.
The Extension Plan
The first thing that you will need to do is talk to an architect who can offer advice and draw up plans for your home extension. You will need to decide whether you are doing a single or multi-story extension, depending on how much space you need and how big your budget is. Once you have an idea of how you are going to extend your home, you will now need to apply for the relevant planning permission.
Obtaining Planning Permission
The permissions you are going to need will depend on where you live, the local rules in place, as well as what sort of extension you plan to build. Your architect can often help when it comes to planning permission as they will most likely know the local planning codes so that they can ensure the extension plans will be accepted, making the process simple. While you are waiting for your planning permission to come through, you can start the process of finding your local contractors and suppliers.
Finding Reputable Local Tradespeople
There are many building specialists and roofing contractors in Sydney or in your local area that can assist you when building an extension to your home, but before committing to one, you should first do some research online. Using the Internet, you will be able to find all the reviews of the company in question and see what previous customers think of their services. You will also be able to find examples of prior work that they have done, and you may even have examples of their work locally that you can drive past and see how it looks. You will either need to line up all the tradespeople yourself or hire the services of a project manager to oversee everything, which can make things run much smoother, although it may increase the costs slightly.
Additional Considerations
When you are forming your building plan for the extension of your home, you will also need to make allowances for both the budget and timescale in case either of these goes over. Make sure that your deadlines are not too tight, and always have additional funds in case prices go up significantly during your build. Once you have everything in place, you can confirm the start date with your builders. Before you know it, you can transform your home and extend your living space without having to uproot your family and move to a new house.
“This article is published in partnership with Mediabuzzer”