Adding an Extra Bathroom to Your Sacramento Home

Adding an extra bath can cost less than buying a home with two baths in Sacramento.

Adding an extra bathroom to your Sacramento home is the single best value booster you can do if you buy a home with one bath. Now, I realize many people are wary of home improvement projects for a lot of reasons, most of it having to do with lack of knowledge . . . and lack of knowledge can produce fear. Fear produces resistance. And resistance results in no action at all. I have discovered this little scenario first-hand when I bought my very first home, so I speak from experience as well. Fortunately, I got over it. Knowledge is power.

Not knowing anything about construction or how you would go about adding an extra bathroom in Sacramento should not result in passing up a perfectly marvelous home because it features only one bath and you want two baths. Every home buyer in Sacramento wants at least two baths in a house, but some settle due to price restraints, or they fall in love with the neighborhood, ultimately the home, so they buy a one bath house and wonder what to do next.

The thing is once you understand construction, there is nothing scary about it all. I recall when I remodeled a bath many years ago and decided to add a row of block glass as a window at the top of my shower. It involved a supporting wall. That was a little frightening to me. What if the roof fell in? But I hired a contractor who installed windows for a major supplier in town and he framed it for $200. Well, actually he charged me $75, and I gave him a bonus because he underpriced his work. See? Costs are all over the place. You can’t really Google it and get an estimate. You need to talk to contractors.

I began reading home improvement books to understand the scope of the work involved and to get a feel for dealing with contractors. It is not rocket science. Not nearly as complicated as you might imagine. I’ve known people with the intelligence level of plant life who work on plumbing, for example. I’ve built my own garage with my own two hands. Further, when we bought our present home in Land Park, there was no gas line into the kitchen. My contractor charged us $400 to add a gas line from the gas meter, and that was probably too much. Now we have a gas stove. Yet, I’ve seen buyers pass on a home with an electric range.

When I was in the market (yes, even Sacramento Realtors can act just like a buyer and forget about a Realtor hat) and touring homes in Land Park, my husband and I insisted on looking only at two-bath homes, which we eventually bought. But I passed up a perfectly gorgeous Tudor on Markham because it had only one bath. In hindsight, it would have cost about $15,000 to have added an extra bathroom to that home. Yet we paid a lot more for our home, much more than that home on Markham cost, simply because our home had two baths.

So, I urge you not to mirror this mistake. If you love the home you’re looking at but you need to add an extra bathroom, consider adding an extra bathroom. Contrary to popular belief, it is not expensive, even if you have to add the bath to the exterior. The cost of new construction in Sacramento averages around $185 to $200 a square foot. This means a 10×10 bath could cost around $20,000. Why pay $50,000 or $100,000 more for a 2-bath home when you could just add an extra bathroom? If your dream home happens to have only one bath, don’t pass it up.