Wow, Mama, I had forgotten those pic of your new addition, and I was not aware of the "assisted living" option you planned into it. Now that I am so familiar with your kitchen, these pics give me a good idea of the adjoining space. What a lovely setting for your home, as well! You and your late DH put a lot of thought into it all. Love the swings, too. My grandma had a swing in her 'finished' basement. Like Interior Stylist's childhood home, it was a tiny post-war home (a cape style) with an unfinished attic. But it had a regular staircase heading up there, so it was easily used as living space. It was my sister's bedroom when we inherited Grandma's house and moved into it in my late teens. DSis lived up there until we sold the house. I only lived there one year, and my room was the smaller of the two main floor bedrooms. Mom had the larger one. DGma's basement had the lino tile floor and painted walls, but her bar was quite large, with knotty pine paneling behind it and a real bar-style footrest (pine, not brass) that made it all seem so posh to me. Many family gatherings were held down there in my youth and then in my late teens when my mom and her friends gathered there. Her BF's daughter was from the South and had never seen a basement. She used to call the pantry storage area under the basement stairs the "downstairs attic" and the name stuck. Fun memories. I still have the oak folding screen that DGMa used to hide the furnace and HWH. I wish I still had the original fabric, so 1950's. I have hauled that screen from home to home for 30 years, never using it, just carrying it and putting it in whatever storage area I have had. Someday, I know, I will want it. It is funny how short it is. If I tried to use it as a dressing screen, my upper "lady parts" would show over the top! I wonder if the staircase going up to the attic is the defining feature between a cape and a ranch? That, and the roof line. My house that I cannot sell, here - the one with the new $30,000 kitchen remodel in 2003 is a basic 900 sq ft 1950s ranch. It has, however, a one-car attached garage. Because the house is up on a basement foundation, 36" above grade, and the garage has the same roof line of the house, there is room above the garage for a cape-style second-storey room. So the real estate agent listed it as a cape. It does have that 'regular' kind of stairway that a cape has, not a pull-down stair (like in a ranch access to an attic) to get to the room above the garage. That room was 12" x 23" of usable living space, plus the low ends. I always thought that the room needed a shed roof bump-out overlooking the back yard. Before we ever got to considering that, though, DDad in-law moved in with us when DM in-law died. We learned there was no easy way to make a second bathroom there, and that was the main problem with the house once a 90 year-old was added to the family! I even had the drain in the garage floor scoped, hoping it was a sewer drain and I could make the garage into living space, but it turned out to be hooked into the rainwater drainage, instead. So we moved. When I had first moved into that house as a single divorced woman with a new degree and new career, I replaced the old gravity furnace. That room above the garage was a challenge to heat. It had an illegal gas furnace up there before I bought it. The HVAC men said there was no way to get duct work up to heat the room because the wall connecting the garage to the house had once been an outside wall and that somehow made adding duct work undoable. (The first family to live in the home added the garage a year after the house was built.) I went out into that garage, pointed at the windows looking from the house basement into the garage and said "aren't these big enough for duct work? they said they COULD get duct work through, but that since the garage had finished walls and ceiling, they could not hide the ducts. Being a great fan of the movie "Brazil," ducting was not ugly to me, so I just had them strap the insulated ducts to the garage ceiling and walls. I figured if anyone ever opened up the garage ceiling and walls in the future, they could be hidden, but that it was worth it to have the plastic-covered ducts making the garage space ugly, meanwhile, in exchange for having usable living space above. DUH! Men! Were they more concerned about their nice finished garage walls than whether the room above the garage was usable? It wasn't even THEIR garage! (Sorry Scott and Jay and all you anonymous Smaller Homers who have the Y chromosome, just a generalization not meant to hurt your individual feelings!) So that is how we fixed that problem. Heated upstairs space - ta da!

Tell any contractor that you assume the cost of doubling the size of a project "won't be that much different," and you'll get a reality check. It greatly depends on the size of the original project. I expect that you'd agree that pushing it out one foot as opposed to two feet "won't be that much different". That's doubling. 6 feet vs 12 feet might be more of a difference, but with part of the addition being a bathroom, I figured that the fixed cost of all of the plumbing etc would be a greater factor than the variable cost of the additional square footage. I wouldn't think you'd be able to renovate an existing bathroom for the price that the first person quoted! It goes to show that prices vary so much depending on location. My main point was that he should consider going bigger and find out actual prices. Don't get locked into a certain mindset based on possibly false assumptions. Granted, I should have said might not be instead of won't be. There are too many unknowns in this situation to make any kind of absolute judgment.

I'm in the suburban southeast. We currently have a 16x8 patio (walls on 2 sides), got estimates to change it to a 16x16 screened porch with a shed roof. One estimate was $16000. The other estimate was $23000.

Zennifer I understand what you're trying to do, totally understand the location and blood/sweat/tears you've got in the current home. But prepare to be shocked. My guess is financially you'd still be better off moving. I wouldn't attempt an addition onto your house without an architect's help bc I agree it could easily look funky and wrong. The examples above proved it for me. How much would it suck to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into it, only to have it look bad in the end? Good luck. I've been there. Loved my old little home but it didn't make financial sense to add on. We moved. Sometimes I still miss that old house but it was the right decision.