Homeowner Forum / Construction / April 2006

The subjects in play: Structural engineering; integration of old and
new construction.

The scenario: We own a nice, 2,100-sf house on a beautiful half-acre
lot in an extremely desireable and rapidly appreciating area. The
original core of the house was a very well-built Cape Cod, late 1940s,
with one full bathroom, one proper bedroom and one walk-through bedroom
downstairs. A 1982 addition (several owners ago) put two BRs and a bath
upstairs in the former attic. The owner before us added a family room
and garage off to one side, and we tweaked the kitchen after moving in
eight years ago.

The upstairs area is certainly liveable but suffers from two drawbacks:
1) Lack of HVAC in the bathroom and stairwell, and 2) Lingering
reminders that it was meant to be an attic. In the latter regard, we
have steeper stairs and squeakier floors than we would wish, as well as
some slight but noticeable cracking and settling downstairs. We also
noticed, months after we bought the place (no great credit either to us
or to our inspector), that support jacks had been installed in the
crawl space under one side of the house -- we presume to deal with the
added weight of the upstairs addition.

Now we are in a position to consider a next step with this place.
Slightly more humble places all around us are being bulldozed to make
way for million-dollar homes. We have no interest in building one of
those. Yet we are strongly wedded to this neighborhood. Our equity and
credit would permit us to do a refi that would allow for a major
renovation, and it's possible that we could afford to do a complete
rebuild (at a scale rather less grand than what has been built all
around us in the past few years). We are highly debt-averse and would
require a really good reason to take on additional borrowing.

We'd prefer to scrape the top off the house, get the upstairs reworked
properly (if structurally possible), and build a wing out the back that
would add square footage and value -- not necessarily in that order.
But we want to make a rational decision, and it's one on which we're
not experts.

Do those basement jacks, and the squeaky floors, mean the top of the
house is already overloaded? Would we just make matters worse by
reconfiguring the second floor?

I doubt those are the only questions we ought to be asking. Any
thoughts will be welcome.

Thanks,
Tom Wood