Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We paid about $300k to add master bed/bath over existing garage/laundry room about 15 years ago. Still best house decision we ever made.

Why so much money to add basically one room over an already existing one (the garage)? Did you have to redo the garage foundation to support the added weight? Reroute plumbing significantly? We have an attached garage that we might one day want to build on top of, but probably not if it's going to be over $400,000.

The existing garage/laundry is taken down to basically its walls, steel support beams added, we bumped out the garage 6' and then added the bedroom level over the garage+ space. New master bath added over existing laundry room. We did need to upgrade or add water lines, water heater and electrical panel.

Just make sure that you do NOT skimp on the insulation between the garage and the master. I stayed in an airBnB once that had a master over the garage and it was not properly insulated. The master and master bath were so cold in the cold weather. Not pleasant. Probably worse if you spend that much money to end up with an addition that was too warm in the summer and too cold in the winter.

They are adding the garage.

Anonymous wrote:We paid about $300k to add master bed/bath over existing garage/laundry room about 15 years ago. Still best house decision we ever made.

Why so much money to add basically one room over an already existing one (the garage)? Did you have to redo the garage foundation to support the added weight? Reroute plumbing significantly? We have an attached garage that we might one day want to build on top of, but probably not if it's going to be over $400,000.

We paid about $300k to add master bed/bath over existing garage/laundry room about 15 years ago. Still best house decision we ever made.

About $400k is likely a good guess. We want to do something similar, but are now scaling back to a smaller addition that won't include bathroom or kitchen work, hopefully in the $250k range, that will also not require us to move out of the house or put everything in storage. It won't be as good of a return on our investment, but it will make the house more useful for us for the next five years while we decide if we want to stay or move.

Read the posts here about additions and renovations to get a sense of the costs. Depending on what else you do (because scope creep is a thing) I'd assume $400k as a starting point. As a recent thread makes clear, a tear-down/rebuild will probably cost you well over $1m. We went the reno/addition route instead of a teardown but YMMV.

We're thinking of adding a garage with a master on top to our cape in Bethesda. Anyone do or consider something similar during COVID? How much did it cost/was the estimate? I'm worried with all the increased costs lately it's going to approach the cost of just tearing down the house and rebuilding (which we don't want to do). TIA!