Offer Your Clients Practical Upgrades

Budgets are tighter than ever and home owners are finally choosing to build smaller homes. However, smaller footprints come at a price and that often means less storage space and few places to store seldom used items.

Attic Trusses

Clients of mine are finally starting to downsize new homes from the McMansions to more reasonable size homes. After we strip away all the excess, homeowners quickly realize that storage space and closets are a real premium. Fortunately, I typically offer a couple solutions that are fairly inexpensive which offer lots of usable space. The first option is upgrading the roof trusses to attic trusses. As you can see in the photo above the attic of this Colonial Home now has a cavernous storage area that can be used for storing all kinds of seasonal items or items that don’t get used very often. The solution typically only costs $1,000 to $3,000 dollars and the owner ends up with hundreds of square feet and much better access to mechanicals like air conditioning equipment.  Click here to learn how to upgrade roof trusses to attic trusses.

Basement Storage Room

Another great solution is building a decent sized storage room in the basement. We often build them with plywood walls and large, deep, built-in storage shelving. Storage rooms like this are great for storing boxed clothing, holiday decorations and other seasonal items. Many times we’ll build these rooms adjacent to the mechanical room which offers up some minimal heat and a central location so the remaining basement can be finished at a later date. This option again only costs roughly $1,000 to $3,000 depending on the size and amount of shelving.