How to Design a House in Readiness for Future Changes
Flexible home architectural designs can help homeowners to incur lower costs when they choose to modify the home in response to their needs as their family set up changes. This article discusses some suggestions that you can present to your architect so that he or she designs a home that will be easier to modify later on.
Foreseeing Future Needs for a Hallway
Some people add an extra bedroom to the house in order to accommodate an elderly relative who has come to live with them. Such a building extension usually requires space for a hallway to be carved out of an existing room. That adjustment can leave the original room with less space for its occupants. This inconvenience can be avoided by having a floor plan that anticipates the need for a hallway to an extra room later on. The architectural building design can make the room where the hallway will be carved out of to be larger so that the room will remain reasonably sized once the extension is eventually built when that need arises.
Anticipating Future Attic Uses
It is also possible to have a building design that makes it easier for you to expand the usable space in your home by occupying the attic. Such a modification can be possible if your architect anticipates this future need and chooses a roof truss or rafter design that makes it possible to have ample headroom once the attic modification is done later on. The attic design can also cater for an access route that will not inconvenience users of the rooms close to the access point.
Handling Future Wiring and Plumbing Needs
Wiring and plumbing adjustments present one of the biggest headaches when someone wants to modify his or her home. This is because such a person finds him or herself having to break through walls or siding in order to run electrical or power lines. The modification would be much easier if the architectural design incorporated plumbing pipes and wires for those anticipated changes. You can then simply cut through the drywall in order to access an electrical or plumbing line for the adjustment that you have made years after your home was constructed.
It may seem expensive to make provisions for those future changes as the architectural plan of your home is drawn. However, that extra cost that you incur will more than repay itself when you avoid the inconveniences of redoing the wiring or external envelope of your home just because a life change, such as the birth of another child, has necessitated the modification of your small home. The modification will go smoothly and quickly because a provision for it had been made as the home was designed.
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