GENERAL CONTRACTING - ADDITIONS

Taber Builders Inc. offers full general contracting services including remodeling. We are fully insured and have over 40 years of experience. Our experience has helped us become one of the most respected contractors in our community. We believe that in our industry, there is no substitute for doing the job right! We offer custom home building, remodeling and renovation services including bathroom remodeling, kitchen remodeling, basement finishing and home additions.

Full Service Concrete - General Contracting - Custom Built Homes
Please use the Free Consultation form or call us at 630-761-1634 and let us help you decide what are your best options.

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An Addition Is Won or Lost Below Grade

This is the job our background matters most on. An addition is a new foundation carrying a new structure, tied into a building that has already finished settling. Get the footings and the foundation right and everything above them is ordinary carpentry. Get them wrong and no amount of good framing upstairs will save it, because the new work and the old work will move at different rates and the joint between them will show you every year.

Footings here have to be carried below the frost line, which in this part of northern Illinois is deeper than people expect, and your village will confirm the figure it enforces. Bearing has to be on undisturbed soil, not on the fill that got pushed against the house at some point in its life. We pour our own footings and foundations. That work is not going out to whoever is available that month.

Three Different Projects People Both Call an Addition

A bump-out extends an existing room by a few feet and is often the best value on the list, because it can sometimes be cantilevered and avoid a full foundation. A full room addition is a new foundation, a new roof and a real tie-in to the existing structure. A second storey is the most involved of the three, because the existing foundation and framing have to be verified as capable of carrying it before anything else is discussed. These have very different costs, and the right one is usually decided by what the house and the lot allow rather than by preference.

The Lot Decides More Than the Plan Does

Setbacks, lot coverage limits and easements vary by village across the Fox Valley, and they will shape the footprint before an architect draws anything. It is worth knowing what the lot permits at the start, because it is cheaper to find the boundary on paper than after a design you like has been drawn against it. We handle the permitting and we will tell you early if what you are imagining does not fit.

Making It Not Look Like an Addition

The tell is always the same: rooflines that do not resolve, siding or brick that nearly matches, window proportions that belong to a different decade, a floor level that steps for no reason. Matching an existing house is detail work and it is the difference between an addition and an extension of the house. On older homes an exact material match is sometimes impossible, and when that is the case the honest answer is to make the new work deliberately distinct rather than almost the same.