Reply to Is there any way to add space to a house for $50K-ish or less?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Absolutely bone-headed building code changed in MoCo and Arlington are responsible for a big part of the skyrocketing cost of additions. You basically can’t put an addition on top of a crawl space and concrete footers anymore. Everything has to be on foundation. And what’s more, that new foundation can’t just be next to the old one, it has to dig down underneath it to connect or some nonsense.  So if you want to change your footprint you have to call in an excavator and a cement truck, engineers, etc. [/quote]

This is the International Residential Code. Different jurisdictions are more aggressive about adopting the latest version and enforcing it but it's the national standard.

Making houses have appropriate foundations is not a bad thing.  [/quote]

Yes, but I’m pretty sure people have been building houses on crawl spaces and footers for a long time and there’s no good reason to make that illegal. Just a dumb regulation adopted without any cost benefit analysis. [/quote]

Nothing in the IRC precludes crawl spaces. From the way you use "footers" I think you mean piers, nothing in the code precludes that either. It's just that when you size them appropriately for soil conditions the cost advantage over a trench foundation disappears.

It's not that there was no cost-benefit analysis, it's that they stopped discounting the future so severely. [/quote]

What’s funny is that I already had an addition on my house from the 1980s, built on crawl space and footers, and after we had an engineer analyse it we concluded it could support a second story. Seems like whoever built the thing had a pretty good grip on “the future”.[/quote]

By "footers" do you mean posts? Because every foundation has a footing. [/quote]

Maybe piers on footers. Though I've seen it described as posts, as in post and beam. I have a 1950 Cape Cod built on pier and beam foundation with open crawl space. I think code allowed 1.5 stories built on these foundations, though I could be remembering that incorrectly.[/quote]

Code no longer allows any wood below ground. You can do piers, but you the pier has to be concrete to the surface. You then can have a treated wood post sitting on top of the concrete pier. Since the post isn't continuous, you have to have bracing to keep it from hinging at the point it attaches to the concrete if there is any horizontal force. It's all doable, but it becomes more expensive, to the point where you might find it easier just to dig  trench and lay concrete block. [/quote]

Thanks for describing the difference. [/quote]

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