The Anatomy of Your Home
Whether or not you’re looking to remodel your home, rearrange your bedroom furniture, or feng shui your apartment, it is important to get to know your home first.
The new walk-in closet might seem perfect on the south wall of your bedroom, but what you might not know is inside those walls that you might be knocking down heating and cold-air return ducts that serve both floors. The existing plumbing in the bath is generally embedded in a concrete floor, which is not so easy to move around. The proposed location of the additional room could put it directly over the septic tank. Knowing the anatomy of your home will save major time and future headaches, especially if you are doing any renovations or remodeling yourself.
To know your home is to know the basic elements:
The foundation consists of slabs, basements, and crawl spaces. In wet and coastal areas, it may be more common to build homes up on posts as well as having the foundation. Slabs are the easiest foundation to build and are generally made from concrete. Basements can be anything and everything, from Freddy Krueger scary to the finished and heated floors of a fully functional basement.
Next, the very bones of your home will be the bearing walls and reinforcing members. These elements are important for, not only dividing your home into rooms, but help to keep your roof from blowing off in heavy storms.
Roof trusses or roof rafters are used in many applications such as new construction or add-on additions, while floor trusses are perfect for new construction or additions, and are recommended to create multi-level structures, while hiding ducts, HVAC, and electrical elements.
Of course there is more to the home than just concrete, walls, and rafters, but once you have your home structurally sound (and inspected), it is then your job to make it your own. With more than 20 uses for the different rooms of your home, (bedroom, bathroom, laundry, patio, office, dining room, living room, closets, lofts, kitchen, great room, utility room, nursery, mud room, porch, basement, foyer, vomitorium, guest room, attic, bonus room, game room, trophy room), the possibilities to breathe life into your home are endless.
