Since purchasing her Beverly home in 1984, Lynn Tracy has made some major upgrades, adding a new furnace, central air conditioning and a new roof. She has also remodeled the kitchen and made improvements to bathrooms upstairs and down.
The one thing Tracy hasn’t done is add space to the 50-year-old, cozy Cape Cod of about 1,230 square feet.
As a result, things are a little cramped for the divorced mother and her two teenage girls.
“Three women sharing one full bathroom can be a problem at times,” admitted Tracy. “And I love to cook and entertain but the kitchen is so small. I’m always bumping into people.”
With all the improvements she has made to the home, Tracy would prefer to expand the two-bedroom brick Cape Cod rather than move. Plus, the school teacher loves her Southwest Side community and plans to live there until she retires. “But the prices of the larger homes in the community have been going up,” she said.
To accommodate her wishes, Tracy sketched out a basic floor plan that would add a one-story addition across the back of the home. The addition would house a family room, allow her to enlarge the kitchen, and add a shower to the downstairs bathroom, making it a full bathroom.
To help Tracy sort out her options, we asked for help from architect Michael E. Messerle, of the Loop-based firm The Gettys Group Inc.
Upstairs, downstairs
After surveying the inside and outside of the house, Messerle had one main suggestion: “I would build the addition to add space to both the first and second floors of the home.”
Messerle had several reasons for his recommendation.
The first was to avoid “overdeveloping the first floor and underdeveloping the second floor,” he said.
“What you’ll have is this really wonderful space downstairs but still only two bedrooms and one bathroom upstairs,” he said. “You’re probably one of the few two-bedroom homes in this community. Although you’re planning to be in the house for a while, you’ve still got to consider resale.”
A second reason was that a two-story addition would make an easier tie-in with the Cape Cod’s steep roof pitches. “The hardest thing about any one-level addition is tying it in with the roof line,” he said, adding that a rectangular one-story addition could stick out of the back of the building awkwardly.
Finally, it would not be that much more expensive to add a second floor to the addition, Messerle said. “Your biggest costs are going to be moving a catch basin and your central air conditioner compressor, which would have to be done anyway to build the first-floor addition.”
Too narrow
Downstairs, Messerle agreed that a rectangular addition would best serve the home. He suggested, however, bringing the addition out an additional two-feet to a 14-foot width to better accommodate the Tracys’ lifestyle.
“A 12-foot-wide addition is a little tight for a family room and a long narrow space such as that is hard to furnish,” he said.
The new space-totaling roughly 420 square feet-would contain the family room and an eat-in kitchen area, allowing Tracy to add more counter space in the existing kitchen area.
The family room area would open up to the kitchen, offering a great room design. “The additional space would be nice because I’d like to place both a grand piano and a big screen television in the family room and I don’t want things cramped,” Tracy said.
To accommodate the addition, a small, unheated mud room and small, unheated sunroom that jut out on each side of the back of the house would need to be demolished, and a portion opened up in the existing back brick wall.
The existing French door to the sun room patio could remain in place, offering access to the new family room from the living room, said Messerle.
“That would be nice because we could close the door and create two separate spaces,” said Tracy. “My daughter could play piano in the living room and I could watch television in the family room.”
On the outside, Messerle suggested tying in a deck to the addition that could be accessed from the family via patio doors. “We would make it an irregular shape to keep things from getting so boxy,” he said.
A small mud room-a place to hang coats-could also be added to the new kitchen area. “That’s a good idea because we hardly ever use the front door of our house,” said Tracy.
Upstairs, the addition would be tied into the roof lines and tapered so that it produces roughly 324 square feet of space, accommodating a third bedroom and a second full bathroom.
Put to good use
After her daughters moved out, Tracy said, she could use one of the additional bedrooms as a sewing room, a hobby that currently is housed in the unheated sunroom.
The existing small hallway would be extended to offer access to the new bedroom. Knee-wall space created by the roof lines could be used as closets.
Cost was a concern to Tracy, and Messerle made several suggestions to keep down the price of the new space.
“Because you’ve already redone the kitchen, we would save a lot of expenses there as far as cabinetry and plumbing-two of your most costly improvements,” he said.
For the addition’s exterior, Messerle suggested using siding instead of brick. “It would be a lot less expensive,” he explained.
At roughly $100 a square foot, the new downstairs space would cost about $42,000, Messerle estimated, while the upstairs addition would cost an additional $7,000-thanks to the various cost-cutting measures.
Surveying the street of large Cape Cods and Georgians, Messerle concluded that “the neighborhood could easily support this type of improvement.”
“You would definitely not be overimproving,” he said. “In fact, a two-bedroom home in this area is unusual. You would be bringing the home in line with the rest of the area.”
