One of your rooms is tiny, and you need to extend it, or maybe it isn't small, but you want to add a home bar or another improvement, but you're struggling to find space. How can you get more space? Do you need a home addition, or is there another way to get what you want? Use these room extension ideas to add more usable space in a creative way!
1) Porches, Terraces, and Yards
If you have a porch or terrace next to the room you want to expand, now is the time to use it. If not, you can expand any place with an exterior wall to include your yard or a piece of it. Add glass sliding doors like the ones in the photograph. This gives you as much extra space as you can spare from your yard, which could be a lot if you have a decent-sized yard. If you're extending the room for a specific purpose, you'll have to decide if an outdoor extension is okay for that purpose.
2) Connect Existing Rooms
If you want to extend an interior room, the only way to do so is to connect it to an existing room. You may later decide to put an extension on your house to make up for that lost room. For now, you can enlarge your space by taking out part of a wall and adding a sliding door panel like this or by taking out a larger chunk of wall and leaving it open.
3) DIY Spread Out
Once you've extended a room, you'll need to figure out how to reorganize to fill that new or repurposed space. One of the critical things that you can now do is spread out to fill the space. You can make shelves like this diamond-shaped shelf without worrying that it wastes space or buy furniture that's decorative instead of space-saving. Think about some unique shapes for your furniture, and get tables that don't double as storage space!
4) DIY On a Budget
Extending a room is a big task, and you may be thinking that it's necessary, but you can't afford it. If you're just browsing ideas, here's one for you; you can make a room bigger on almost any budget. Use this guide by Lucy Searle to learn how you can extend an area when you don't have a lot of money. The guide can help you plan the extension and reduce costs, though if your budget is low enough, you might have to do a smaller extension, such as building a shelf in between the wall studs.
5) Adapt for Room Type
Why do you need an extension? Are you trying to build a home bar for your living room, dining room, or kitchen? Do you need room for more kitchen appliances, or is your living room too cramped for the 64-inch TV you want? Your reason for extending the room will determine how you can do it. For example, if you're doing a kitchen extension, you can use this guide to plan it perfectly. Make sure you tailor your plans to the room type so you can plumb anything you need and wire in your electricity correctly.
6) Load Bearing Walls?
Before you take out a wall to make your room bigger, you'll need to address some structural concerns. When the original builder made your house, they might have put that wall there for a reason. If the wall is load-bearing, you can compromise the house's structure by taking it out. Luckily, you can use this video by Emmet Leo Homes to learn how to check if a wall is load-bearing. If it is, you need to build a header to support the weight when you take out the wall.
7) White Paint
If you have a small room that needs to be extended, you might have already noticed that darker colors make it look smaller. Make sure to paint the walls white to make the room look bigger, and once you've extended it, use white paint like this to ensure that people get the full effect of your newly enlarged space. You don't want to expand the room and then paint it dark colors so that it looks just as small and cramped as it was before.
What kind of extension are you looking to do? Room extensions are complex tasks, and we'd love to hear how you did yours. Tell us about it in the comments below.
