I’ll be doing the plans and engineering for an addition to a classic American foursquare house.
These houses, the McMansion of the first third of the last century, were built in large numbers in American cities. From about 1900 to 1930, they were put up en masse, usually on narrow lots in what constituted the country’s first subdivisions. Following the patterns of thought and development that sprung from industrialization and mass production, most all of these houses were pre-planned, with all wood parts cut in shops and factories, then shipped by rail to city and town yards and sidings, where the crates got offloaded to trucks for jobsite delivery.
This was pre-engineered housing with an amazing degree of semi-customization. Sears Roebuck sold over 50 varieties of the basic plan. Catalogs, pattern books, and newspapers advertised whole house packages, including all the precut lumber for the frameup and exterior siding and trim, at prices less than $2,000.
No deliveries of bunks of uncut studs and joist and rafter stock. No roofs to figure. Just read the plans and the book, and nail ‘er up and stack it, son. Anything you cut will likely result in a foul-up, and we’ll take that yard-bought new lumber we need to fix your mistakes, out of this week’s meager pay.
A big two story box, plain, and wearing a hipped prairie style roof, they were clad in brick, wood, stucco, and even stone veneer. The most simply adorned have one hipped dormer front and center, the fancier ones got more at sides and rear. Perhaps a bay window. Almost always a full width front porch.
Four rooms down, one per quadrant, and the same up, with a staircase that is almost always a winder.
The programs for doing additions to these must be remarkably similar, or at least for the past thirty years. With one bathroom in the house, and that being upstairs, any addition almost always puts another bath, usually a half bath, on the main floor.
To make one have a modern feel, and be comfortable for a family per today’s standards, they need a bump out that adds space for a modern kitchen and that badly needed powder room on the first, and on the second, let’s have that new master bedroom suite, please, with all the trimmings.
Here are some pics and plans showing the common big budget addition. The rear of the house, before, is shown. Note the earlier addition.
Here are the plans for the new work, and you can see the before and after. I’ll bet that in the before main floor view, that full-width living room was once two rooms.
The view here shows the house with its new addition, whose footprint is roughly 350 sf per floor, for a total new build of 700 sf.
Here is the new kitchen.
We’ll be planning something similar here, and I will post some stuff later to show you how things go.
