Second story additions in Minnetonka

Minnetonka's appeal has always been the land: wooded lots, winding streets, midcentury homes tucked under mature trees in Groveland, Glen Lake, and Minnetonka Mills. Those same qualities are what make expanding outward complicated. Many Minnetonka parcels sit inside the city's shoreland overlay district — land within a thousand feet of a lake or three hundred feet of a creek — where extra setback and coverage standards apply on top of base zoning, and where pushing the footprint toward the water is exactly the wrong direction.

A second story solves the geometry. Building up adds the bedrooms, the office, and the second bathroom inside the footprint the lot already carries — no new impervious surface, no trees sacrificed, no shoreland variance conversation. For the 1950s and 60s ramblers that fill Minnetonka's established neighborhoods, an upper level converts cleanly: simple rooflines, rectangular footprints, and a structure an engineer can verify and reinforce where needed. The house doubles; the woods stay.

Every project is designed for this climate's physics — the new roof engineered to Hennepin County's fifty-pound ground snow load, new footings (where a stair or porch needs them) down at the forty-two-inch frost depth, and the new upstairs insulated to current code so it holds heat the way the original house never could. Lighthouse Development Group runs design, engineering, and the City of Minnetonka Community Development permit as one team, and builds with the new level weatherproofed above your existing roof before the old roof is removed — so the household below stays warm, dry, and home from the first day of the build to the last.

Neighborhoods we serve in Minnetonka

ZIP codes served: 55345 · 55305 · 55343 · 55391