Family Room Additions

A ground-floor room the whole household uses

Plenty of houses have a formal living room that nobody sits in and a kitchen where everyone ends up standing. A family room addition gives the household one large room where people actually gather, usually off the back of the house and opening from the kitchen, so whoever is cooking is still part of the evening.

Size is what sets this room apart from other additions. A family room is wider and often taller than a bedroom or an office, frequently with a vaulted or raised ceiling, a wall of windows toward the yard, and sometimes a fireplace or built-in shelving. Each of those choices is also a structural choice, and they are easiest to change while the plan is still on paper.

We start with how you want to use the room: a big sectional facing a television, a table for games, a corner for homework, a clear line of sight to the yard while the kids play. Those uses decide where the windows and openings go and which walls stay solid for furniture.

We also look at what the new room does to the rest of the house. A large addition off the back can darken the existing kitchen once its old windows look into the new room, so we plan daylight through the opening and from above where the roof allows it.

Long spans and wide openings into the kitchen

A large room with no posts in the middle needs long spans. Floor joists and roof framing for a wide room often call for engineered lumber, and a vaulted ceiling needs a structural ridge beam or ties so the walls are not pushed outward under snow load. New England snow is real weight sitting on a roof for weeks at a time, and the framing is designed for it.

The opening from the kitchen into the family room is usually wide, and the old exterior wall there is usually bearing. We replace it with a beam sized for the span and carry the load down through posts to footings. If the wall carries a load we tell you before anyone swings a hammer, and we lay out the choice between a flush beam hidden in the ceiling and a dropped beam you can see.

Footings go below frost depth, commonly about four feet in Massachusetts, and the point loads that come down from beams and posts need footings sized for them. Those details are in the drawings the building department reviews, and the framing inspection checks them before anything is covered.

Where the new roof meets the old one, the valley and flashing get ice and water membrane, because a large new roof sends a lot of snow and meltwater toward that joint.

You get a written scope before we start and a schedule we update as things move.

Window walls and heating a big room under the stretch code

A wall of glass is what most people picture in a family room, and it is also the largest source of heat loss in the room. Many Massachusetts towns have adopted the stretch energy code, which sets requirements for the walls, roof and windows of new construction. A room with a lot of glass may need higher-performance windows or extra insulation elsewhere to meet it.

Heating a large volume is the main comfort question. The existing boiler or furnace may not have capacity for a big new room, and a high ceiling pulls warm air up and away from the people sitting below it. The answer may be a new heating zone, a ductless system, radiant heat in the floor or a combination. We size it with the licensed trades and put the plan in the written scope.

Glass also brings summer heat and glare. We look at which direction the window wall faces, how deep the roof overhang is and what shade the yard offers before choosing the glass. A west-facing wall of windows with no overhang can make the room hard to sit in on a July afternoon, and that is easier to solve in the design than with blinds afterward.

Ceiling height, floors and sound in a large room

High ceilings change how a room sounds. Hard floors, glass and bare drywall make a big room echo, especially with a television on and a group talking. Rugs and furniture help, and so do built-ins, a wood ceiling or a few wall surfaces with some texture to them.

The floor has to meet the kitchen floor without a step, unless you want one. If the family room is meant to sit a step or two down, that choice is made early so the foundation is set for it. Flooring that runs continuously from the kitchen into the new room needs a flat, stiff floor under the joint, or it will show the seam within a season.

A fireplace or a built-in media wall often becomes the focal point of the room. Fireplace built-ins are work we do, and they are far easier to plan before the walls are framed than to fit in afterward, because the venting, the wiring for the television and the blocking for the shelves all live inside those walls.

Lighting a big room takes more than a grid of recessed cans. We plan some light on the walls, some on the work surfaces and some for lamps, and the wiring for all of it goes in before the insulation does.

How we keep you in the loop on a big open build

A large addition has more moving parts than most jobs: engineered lumber deliveries, window lead times, inspections, and several trades coming and going. You get a written scope before we start and a schedule we update as things move. When the schedule changes, you get the reason along with the new date.

Steve runs the job. He has 20 years in the trade and has run Modern Remodeling for six, and he started the company to give homeowners the communication he did not see while working for others. When something changes, because of what turns up in the old wall or because you rethink a window, you get it in writing before we act on it.

The site is cleaned and closed each day. When the old wall finally comes out, dust walls and floor protection go up first, and the rest of the house stays livable while the two rooms are joined.

Big rooms also invite late changes: a wider window, a second slider, a different ceiling. Those are often possible, and we tell you plainly what each one does to the framing, the inspections and the schedule before you decide.

See the rest of our additions work, or browse the gallery for rooms we have finished.