Working With A Contractor To Add An Addition To Your Home

When buying a first home, many people will purchase one that is the perfect size for them at the time of the sale. As the family grows, the house may become too small, and adding some additional square footage could be an excellent way to expand the home without selling one property and buying another. Working with a residential construction provider is one way to make the house better fit your growing family.

Designing Your Addition

Before you can begin work on any addition to your home, it is vital that an architect looks over the existing house and creates a plan that will maintain the integrity of the structure while adding the space and design elements you want to the home. The residential construction services you are working with may have an architect on staff to help with the design, but you will need to find one locally if they don't. 

The construction of the addition can't start until the design is approved by the building inspector in many states, so completing the drawing and submitting them to the side performance or building inspector's office needs to happen early in the process. If you are using a local architect for the design, you may not need to hire a residential construction contractor until after the plans are approved and ready to start the construction phase. 

Site Inspections

Once the design of your addition is complete, your residential construction contractor will need to determine what site preparation is required before the construction phase can begin. If pipes require relocation or underground electrical lines to move, these things need to happen before any digging begins.

A locating service can go over the property and determine where all the underground services are, mark them with flags, and then the utilities that own the lines will need to come and relocate them for you. In most states, it is illegal to start digging without first checking the area for utilities, so the expense this adds is often a requirement of building the addition.

Adding Your New Space

Once the site is safe, the contractor can begin to put the foundation in place for the addition, and often they will frame and close off the addition before opening the walls between the existing house and the new space. The construction can take some time, and often the residential construction services working on your home will need to add some subcontractors to the job to complete the work. 

Your residential construction contractor will arrange all the trades needed at the site and organize inspections, materials and oversee the work for you. This allows you one point of contact if you have questions along the way and streamlines the process. This gets the project to completion as quickly as possible. 

For more information, reach out to a company like Finesse Contracting.