The idea has fascinated kings and commoners: adding new space to
an existing home can increase enjoyment inside and beauty outside.
You do not have to be Louis XlV, who expanded his father s hunting
lodge at Versailles to accommodate 5,000 people, or even Thomas
Jefferson, who shaped and reshaped a cottage at Menticello for 40
years, to conceive and construct a handsome, useful expansion of
your house. Before building begins, there are choices to weigh and
challenges to assess.
Whatever your need-a breakfast nook, new bedrooms and baths,
a family room or extra space in a living room-there are three
possible ways to achieve it: building out, by adding a small extension
alongside an exterior wall; building up, by placing a second story
atop an attached garage or installing a dormer in an attic; or building
in any direction to create a major addition, a collection of rooms that
forms an independent wing of the house.
All additions have one characteristic in common-at the junction~
of the new and the old, strange metamorphoses occur. Outside walls
turn into inside ones, roofs turn into supports and ceilings turn into
weight-bearing floors. Crucial to the chemistry of such changes is
splicing the new to the old. It is the techniques required for these
connections-rather than the basics of trade s work or the job of
finishing an addition s exterior and interior-that this book concen-
trates on. Cantilevered joists, for example, tie the floor of a walk-in
bay window to the house floor. Extra studs are integrated into exist-
ing walls to mate with the ends of new ones. A weathertight joint
between a new roof and the old depends on precise measuring and
marking, cutting and joining.
An addition raises an important esthetic challenge: creating archi-
tectural harmony between the old and the new. Although there are a
few time-honored guidelines for matching an addition to a house
(pages 8-15), you are likely to find an architect s advice helpful in
solving esthetic problems. But whether you use a professional s expe-
rience or your own good taste, the result should be an addition that
looks as if it ought to have been there all along.
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