Building a House Addition: Pros and Cons

The house addition is the single most expensive home remodeling purchase a homeowner will ever make. If the addition is large enough and complex enough, the total expense will slide well into six figures. 

It's a momentous decision. A house addition cannot be undone. It's also a job that doesn't lend itself well to DIY work, which means that most of the work should be done by professionals.

So, it pays to carefully the pros and cons of building an addition before writing that first check to the contractor. There are countless pros and cons for building an addition. This list narrows all of them down to the top three in each category.

New Construction, From Scratch

A home addition is new-construction, so you're able to start fresh and avoid building on and potentially exacerbating previous mistakes.

You may have an old house that was initially created by a builder and subsequently changed over the years by other homeowners. When you install new floors, paint the walls, or remodel a bathroom, you are only adding your unique touch to this pastiche.

But a home addition is space that you can legitimately claim as your own creation. Building an addition is like designing a whole new house without the expense of a whole new house. Few remodeling projects are as thrilling and creatively satisfying as working with the blank slate that addition-building affords you.

Best Way to Add Space

A house addition is the most effective way to add space to a home when compared against other space-making projects.

A sunroom may not be as good of an investment as other additions if a buyer views it as a lesser quality space or not as functional. If you decide to invest six figures into a fully conditioned sunroom, you might as well just build what you really want, a house addition.

Finished basements are viable spaces for living and entertaining. But unless you have a daylight basement, where one side is ground-level or nearly so, basements can be gloomy places with few or no windows. Plus, you are not adding any more square footage to your home.

Room additions can best be described as mini house additions. These are an addition but are only one room, not multiple. True house additions comprise many rooms. While room additions are your best cost-saving alternative to house additions, they still come at a considerable financial cost and disruption of your privacy.

High Cost-Value Ratio

You stand to recover the greatest percentage of your investment when building an addition.

According to Home Advisor's True Cost Guide, at least 65 percent of the cost of a mid-range two-story addition may be recovered at the time of sale. The key phrase, "may be recovered," means that there is no way of predicting the real estate market years in advance.

It is typically cheaper to build an addition than to buy or build a new home that equals the space of your existing house plus an addition. At the very least, the closing costs involved with selling your old house and buying the new house would push this option over the top.

Higher Resale Price Not Guaranteed

Financial gain is possible when selling a home with an addition, but you could also lose a great deal of money.

Because peripheral costs increase, you may still lose money when you decide to sell the house. More space within the addition means higher heating and cooling costs, more windows to wash and gutters to clean, increased property taxes, and more house to clean.

Even though additions offer the potential for higher cost-value ratios than other renovation projects, you still may not recover the full cost of the addition when you sell. It is a gamble that many homeowners make.

If you sell the home too soon after building the addition, you will likely lose money unless your area is experiencing a hot real estate seller's market.

Loss of Property Space

Additions eat up property space.

Unless you are adding a second story, you will lose yard space by building an addition. Once you build the ground-level house addition, this is space that can never be recovered.

If you have young children and you like for them to play outside, you may want to hold off on the addition until they have matured or no longer care about outside play.

The trend toward smaller and smaller yards continues as mammoth-sized homes envelop lots. In some communities, a backlash against yard-gobbling homes and additions has provoked calls for changes to zoning and permitting.

All-Consuming Project

Building an addition takes up time, consuming your life for months.

In the first few days of building an addition, it can be thrilling. But building an addition is such a long, all-consuming project that it can tax your patience, add stress to your life, and test the strength of relationships.