Yesterday, I got the following question from one of my customers:
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Hi Arun, my house is a 20 year old constructed property. It’s a 2bhk independent house with 1200 sq. ft in ground floor.
Do you think it wise to construct the 1st floor and terrace with a pent house now and give the ground floor for rent?
I am going through all your materials and it’s really helpful.
Regards,
Dileep
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Do you think it wise to construct the 1st floor and terrace with a pent house now and give the ground floor for rent?
It depends on the building’s strength.
When building your ground floor, did you plan to construct one more floor in the future? And informed your engineer to give your house plan for two floors?
If the answer is yes, then you can build it without any issues.
If you have not planned before, then it’s better to ask any structural engineer physically if it’s ok to construct. They may do alternative pillar arrangements by looking at the existing building structure.
In our first building, we also did something similar.
During the planning stage itself, we informed our engineer that we needed to build a G+4 floor building and asked our engineer to do the building plan accordingly.
At first, we built only a G+1 floor building.
We started constructing the 2nd and 3rd floors when constructing our second building. We dropped the 4th floor due to some legal issues.
I also know one of our relatives constructed a G+1 floor without any pillars. It depends on the owners…
Personally, I would not risk anyone’s life without consulting an engineer.
One more thing…
I would not touch such buildings if your existing ground floor also needs major upgrades.
The reason is that major repair work in old buildings gets super expensive.
If you estimate a 3L budget for repair work, you should be ready to spend at least a 10L budget.
The reason is that once you start repairing, you will notice a few more issues or expect new features and thoughts to fix all of those once and for all. And your budget increases a lot.
I have already written about my personal renovating experience with our village house, which is shared on the link below. You can read this to understand what happens when you start renovating:
https://houseconstructionguide.com/before-renovating-old-village-house-read-this/
I am going through all your materials and it’s really helpful.
Thanks for your appreciation.
I wrote and still writing my house construction guides only to help other first-time house construction users avoid common mistakes they make unknowingly.
Because I made many such mistakes, I couldn’t fix them now even if I wanted to.
If users avoid a few mistakes by reading my guide and sharing their feedback, I would be way happier than them.
Arun
PS: This user refers to the content inside my HCG All-Access Pass. Where I share house construction tips, mistakes & best practices that first-time owner usually don’t give attention to while constructing their house.