Thinking about extending your home?
It’s New Year and the time for resolutions. For many of us it’s also the time we think most about improving, or extending our homes.
We’ve all spent a lot more time at home over the last 20 months, and have come to value the importance of our indoor and outdoor spaces. Cleaning out cupboards and getting rid of all the clutter in the house and garden helps make the most of our homes, but perhaps it’s also a good time for you to reconfigure or adapt your home to your better suit your current and future needs.
Create a Home Office or Hobby Space
Spending more time working from home is becoming the norm. But it can be a struggle to work from the kitchen table. Would it make sense to convert your garage into a home office. Now might be the time to build a new garden room or extend your home to create a quiet room away from the noise of your household.
Read about one of our garden room home office projects here.
Alternatively, if you have spaces in your home that you’re not using, then a clever architect might help you reconfigure your home to create new spaces for home working – or for your hobbies.
Whatever your approach, if you’re planning to make improvements to your home it’s also a good opportunity to review your home from a comfort and energy performance perspective too.
Reduce Your Energy Consumption
Spending more time at home over the last couple of years means we’ve all been heating our homes for longer periods. If your home is not very energy efficient you’ll probably have either been made more aware of the draughts and cold spots, or have been experiencing some pretty high utility bills. That, plus the climate emergency, is a reason why it makes sense to review your home’s energy performance as well as your heating system.
Getting an independent sustainability expert such as CLPM to review your arrangements and suggest the best way to improve your home can help you make the best decisions, for you and the planet.
How to Improve Your Home
Improving or extending your home is exciting. But before you rush in and start talking to builders it’s a good idea to talk with an architect or designer. They can often come up with new ideas that you may not have though of. Quite often the solutions they come up with will be more interesting and can be cheaper to build too.
Before you start looking for an architect, sit down and ask yourselves what you’re looking to achieve.
In our experience, it is best to start by asking your self some basic questions:
- What issues do you have with your home?
- What spaces do you think you need that you don’t currently have?
- Is it lack of space or just that you don’t use all of the space you have effectively?
- Could you extend your house, and if so where?
- Would converting your loft or remodelling the existing space be a better alternative?
- If you renovate, remodel or extend would you need planning permission?
- What kind of budget can you afford?
Once you’ve agreed on what you want and how much you can afford it’s easier to find an architect who matches the scale of your plans. For more tips on how to brief an architect click here.
At the same time it’s a good idea to start talking to CLPM at the planning stage of your project. We can help you build better at every stage of your project:
- CLPM’s sustainability team can advise you and your architect on how best to improve the comfort and boost the energy efficiency of your home.
- Our RICS regulated Quantity Surveying team can also help you with cost planning so you build within your budget, and help you find and appoint your builder too.
- CLPM’s project management team can help you to organise your build by producing a Schedule of Works and they provide a variety of options to suit all budgets to support you when your build goes onsite.
If you’re interested to hear more then call us on 01923 896550. Email info@cl-pm.com or complete a contact form.
