The Average Cost of a Room Addition on The Main Line

If you are thinking about adding a room onto your Main Line home, you might be wondering how much it’s going to set you back. The truth is, there are as many answers as there are ideas for your remodel, so while it’s difficult to give you some hard and fast numbers, we can offer some insight into the cost vs. value of certain types of room additions – meaning, the value you would realize once the renovation was complete vs. the overall cost of the job.

For instance, we could say that your Main Line room addition will allow you to recoup your cost somewhere between 49 and 73 percent when you decide to sell your home. The type of addition you choose and the specific features will be the mitigating factors that determine what that value turns out to be.

For instance, you may be adding a room to improve functionality but not necessarily adding square footage. In essence, you are adding personal value for yourself: livability and functionality. In this case, it’s really the materials and the features that will deliver the value. Only you can determine whether the cost is justifiable.

In other words, sometimes the resale value is not the only consideration. Are the changes going to improve your life? Make you happy? These feelings have as much validity as any consideration towards a future sale price. It’s all about what you expect to get out of it.

To give you a rough idea of what the average cost vs. value for a room addition is in the Philadelphia area, here are some ranges to think about:

Bathroom Addition

Midrange:            $52,000        Value added:   $27,000+

Upscale:                   $95,000        Value added:   $149,000+

Master Suite Addition

Midrange:                $140,000      Value added:   $76,000

Upscale:                   $281,000      Value added:   $136,000+

Our Take On The Cost Of A Room Addition

The room addition itself will have its own unique characteristics and issues that you’ll need to think about. For instance:

• Is it one story? or two stories?
• Does it have brick or vinyl siding on the exterior?
• How many windows are you going to have? Lots? Or just a couple?
• Will your floors be hardwood or tile?

Then, you will have to figure out what’s going to go into the room. Is it going to be a bathroom? or a kitchen? The answers will undoubtedly influence the cost in a big way.

You’ll also need to think about how the addition relates to the rest of the house and consider the ancillary requirements of building the addition properly. For instance:

• Is it going to tie into the roof in such a way that you’ll have to replace the roof entirely or at least in places where you can’t simply patch the old roof?
• Can your current heating system support the new space or will you need to add a new system?
• Will you have to redo floors in other parts of the house to make it work aesthetically?
• Is there structural work that needs to be done to open up the two spaces in order to tie the design into the rest of the house?

In its simplest form, a room addition won’t have all of the above. However, if the addition has a bathroom in it, you will need to run plumbing, replace the floors, add a heating system, and so on. These are all things that can significantly impact the cost, depending on what you decide to do.

Every Project Is Unique

Ultimately, a local company like ours can provide you with price ranges such as those listed above simply by adding up the costs of our room addition projects and taking an average, but it generally helps very little in terms of providing you with a guideline as to what your unique addition will cost.

Many of our clients decide on a room addition to make their Main Line home look nice as opposed to adding more square footage, so in our experience, it’s never a simple one-and-done answer.

Budget is and always should be a top concern. If your budget won’t allow you to realize your goals, we may come up with clever ways to design in a way that will help you save you money without sacrificing function and a great finished product.

If you’re thinking about a room addition to your Main Line home, call us to schedule a conversation. We’d love to hear your ideas and talk about how we can help.