Extending your home

Overview

If you own a property or are thinking of buying one, there are many ways you can improve it to either create your dream home or satisfy your current space needs for a number of years. If the work is carried out to a good standard, it will also add substantial value to your home.

Before the extension
After the extension

This part of our site looks at the various methods of increasing the floor area of a property (improvements that do not involve extending are covered separately on our site under Improvements and Maintenance).

As you may only be interested in a particular type of improvement, we have separated the major types of extensions into the six categories shown on the left hand menu. There is some duplication of information between the types but this is inevitable as we aim to provide a thorough look at each area.

Our intention is to introduce you to the most important aspects of all kinds of home extensions, assuming that you have little or no knowledge of the subject.

Rear two storey extension underway

Under each extension type, we look at the design considerations, the building process, the likely cost of the work and how long the project should take.

At the end of this section, we provide you with the advantages and disadvantages of extending your home.

Choosing the best option for you

If you are considering carrying out a major property improvement, it is essential that you consider all of your options before proceeding with a final design.

You may, for example, have thought about extending over an existing ground floor structure to create a bedroom without realizing you have fantastic potential to convert your loft at a lower cost.

You must be clear about why you want to extend your home and what the room or rooms will be used for. You will need to consider furniture arrangements at an early stage which may well impact on the overall room sizes you require.

At myhome mygarden, we have invested in state of the art modeling software  to help you visualize the space you will be creating.

Internal perspectives showing computer generated views of proposal