ᐅ Converting a Single-Family House into a Two-Family House or Subletting

Hello everyone,

We are about to start building our single-family home. We want to keep the option open to rent out the upper floor later on. For this reason, we are considering making preparations now, such as thicker walls for sound insulation and wiring for separate meters.

However, we are unsure whether it actually makes sense to implement the thicker walls for soundproofing at this stage, given that converting the house into a two-family home or renting out the upper floor would likely happen only in 10 or 20 years.

What do you think?

We would really appreciate your feedback.

Best regards

It depends on your specific situation. How old are you, where do you live, and how are you building? It also depends on the layout of your floor plan. In this case, you probably don’t want future tenants to access the upper floor through your part of the ground floor. So this will only work if the floor plan already allows for it, for example with a separate hallway.

In solid construction, I don’t see a need for soundproof walls.

Later on, choose a quiet married couple as tenants rather than a young couple with two lively children. In my opinion, with a concrete ceiling, you can’t really influence this much anyway.