Photo Credit: Milly Eaton, www.pexels.com

If you bought your current home a while ago, you might have started feeling like you are outgrowing your residential space – especially if your family is growing, potentially resulting in you running out of bedrooms or dining space. However, would you really need to relocate?

Given dauntingly high house prices and stamp duty, you could easily be excused for reticence about moving home. Besides, you might still love your current location and neighbours, so here are a few strategies for opening up more of the space you’ve already got.

Conversions

There are various possibilities with a conversion, whether it is your garage or loft that you convert. Furthermore, a conversion can enhance your property’s value, boding well for when you might sell that home later down the line.

Let’s assume that your conversion will result in another bedroom or bathroom. This result would increase your property’s value by up to 20%, says propertypriceadvice.co.uk, while even just another bedroom can add 10%. Adding just a second bathroom will add 5% to the home’s value.

However, it remains crucial that you source the right supplies for your conversion. A loft conversion, for example, could call for raised loft boarding from a company like Instaloft to help prevent damp.

Extensions

An extension can also increase your home’s selling price, though to what extent can depend on this home’s location. For example, whereas a Bedfordshire home costing £300,000 could benefit from a £57,000 rise in its selling price, the profit could be a meagre £66 for a Swindon property.

It’s in London that you can mine especially impressive financial returns from an extension, with an extension priced at £50,000 adding £212,000 to the value of a central London home worth between £1 million and £2 million.

Basement rooms

If you can’t extend outwards, perhaps because you have a mid-terrace house, you could consider extending… under. Yes, a basement extension is a possibility, albeit likely the most expensive one for you, as the waterproof tanking in that extension would need a guarantee.

While carrying out a basement extension can be difficult, building it in the garden rather than the house would be significantly easier. This is because subcontractors you hire for the job could use a digger or mini-digger for excavation, whereas diggers beneath the house would have to dig by hand.

Even if access to your garden is restricted, a mini-digger could be craned across your roof and into the back garden, the Homes & Property website points out.

Some less conventional options…

If you thought that adding a basement room in your garden looked eccentric, wait until you see some of the other space-creating options suggested by House Beautiful.

Those include a PVC igloo which is weatherproof and rust-resistant and can serve as a greenhouse, playroom or conservatory. Meanwhile, the “i-hut” – nothing to do with Apple, but rather looking like a caravan with the exterior styling of a shed – can be towed into place. You might not even need planning permission for it!