You (Probably) Don't Need That Addition

​The goal of this post is to save you money.  Maybe a whole bunch of money.
 
I get to meet a lot of people – almost exclusively inside their homes – and many of them tell me they need more space.  I hear a near-constant chorus of “If only my house were bigger.”  Some of those people do really need more space; most though just need to think about their house differently.  It’s easy to get tunnel vision about your house – you spend so much time there that it’s hard to imagine the dining room being anything different than overflow storage, or your coat closet not being a pantry.  In fact, just this past week, a potential client, Tina, called me to talk about an addition she thought she needed.  ​

The easiest thing for us to do is say OK, and then start designing.  But before we jump in the deep end and subscribe to the idea that you absolutely need to build an addition, we first try to find ways to repurpose your (potentially) currently underutilized space to meet or exceed your short and long term goals.  If the exercise works, GREAT, you just saved a whole bunch of money not building an addition you didn’t need.  If it doesn’t work, GREAT, now you can design and build the addition with the confidence of knowing you really do need it.  The point of the exercise is to educate you on what your options really are, and to help you weigh the pros and cons of each approach.  So in Tina’s case, we didn’t immediately start designing when she said she needed an addition.  What we typically do is  help you see your house differently, and guide you through the following decision-making process:

1. Before we know whether nixing the addition is good advice or not, we first need to understand why you feel like you need more space.  And not the surface-level whys either.  “Because I want a kitchen island” isn’t deep enough of an answer.  Why do you want the island?  “Because I need more storage space.”  Why do you need the storage space?  We keep asking why until we get to the emotional root of the desire.  Once we uncover the emotion behind the request, we can start to look for potential solutions elsewhere.  In Tina’s case, her multi-generational family was growing, needing their own space, and she wanted to spend as much time with her grandchild as possible.
2. We use heat maps.  A heat map is a tool that takes data and represents it graphically.  For example, it could show you the difference between how many people live in Paris, France vs how many live in Paris, Texas by representing each person as a dot on a map. We can do something similar with your home.  We take a floor plan of your home and have you color on it.  You color the rooms you use often in red, rooms you rarely use in blue, and rooms you sometimes use in purple.  Once you’re done, we look for the blue.  Blue means there is opportunity within the existing footprint of your home to repurpose space.  More blue means more opportunity.  In Tina’s case, going through the exercise of discussing her family’s use of each space, I saw that she had a garage but kept the cars on the driveway.  I asked her how she uses the garage and she replied that it’s just used for storage. 
3. We combine the data and then evaluate whether we can solve the emotional WHY issues from exercise 1 with the rational space opportunities of exercise 2.  We do this combination through space planning – showing you different floor plan options of how the new space could lay out.  What we learn generally falls into one of three buckets:

• YES, we can solve the problem within the existing space.  This is awesome because you just saved a bunch of money by not building an addition you really didn’t need.  In Tina’s case, we landed here.  My advice to Tina was to finish the garage for her adult son so he could have his own space and get a storage shed for what she keeps in the garage.  This new project is likely to meet her budget and timeline goals in ways that the addition wouldn’t.  Like I mentioned earlier, sometimes the simplest and most cost-effective solution is right there, but it's difficult to see when you're so close to it. 
• MAYBE.  Sometimes, we can’t solve 100% of the exercise 1 problems within your existing space, so we need to decide together if solving, say, 80% of the issues for 65% of the cost (not building an addition) is worth it.  This is fantastic because you’re getting great value.
• NO, we can’t solve the problem within the existing space.  This is still good news!  Now you know that the space you thought you needed, really is necessary, and you can more forward with the investment confidently.  

Notice that all three of those outcomes are good - there’s no bad result here.  The only way it ends up bad is if decisions are made blindly, which is exactly what the outline above is designed to avoid.
 
If you’re feeling like you need more space, aren’t sure where to start, or just want to understand your house better, please reach out – we’d love to help.
 
Bye for now,
TJ