Home Elevators · Retrofit Guide

Can You Install an Elevator in an Existing House?

Q: Is a retrofit more expensive than putting an elevator in a new build?

Yes. The equipment costs the same, but the construction around it costs more. Creating a shaft, cutting floor openings, excavating a pit, and upgrading electrical service in a finished home all add cost that a new build absorbs during framing.

Usually yes — but in Spokane, the answer depends far more on your house than on the elevator. Here are the five things that actually decide it.

By The Spokane Elevator Company Home Elevators August 4, 2026

It’s the question we hear on almost every first phone call: my house is already built — can you even put an elevator in it?

The short answer is yes, far more often than people expect. Home elevators are retrofitted into existing houses every day, and the equipment made for it has gotten dramatically better in the last decade. But the honest answer, in Spokane specifically, is that the retrofit is rarely about the elevator. It’s about your house — how it was framed, whether there’s a clear path from floor to floor, what’s under the basement slab, and how much electrical service is left in the panel.

Spokane’s housing stock makes that a more interesting question than it would be in a newer city. So rather than a generic yes, here’s what we actually look at, and what tends to decide it.

Why Spokane is a different retrofit problem

Roughly one in five homes in the City of Spokane was built before 1940, and close to 40% went up before 1960. The average single-family detached home in the city is now somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 years old. That’s not a knock on the housing — it’s why so much of Spokane is beautiful. It just means most retrofits here happen in homes built long before anyone designed around a lift.

Practically, we work in four recurring house types:

Craftsman bungalows — the defining Spokane house. Common through West Central, Emerson/Garfield, Logan, East Central, Hillyard, and the lower slopes of the South Hill. Usually 1½ stories, generous main-floor rooms, full basement, low-pitch roof.
Turn-of-the-century Victorians and estate homes — Browne’s Addition and pockets of the South Hill. Tall ceilings, heavy framing, ornate finishes that are expensive to disturb.
Post-war ranches and minimal traditionals — North Hill, Bemiss, Nevada Heights, Whitworth. Often the easiest retrofits, because they’re single-story-plus-basement with simple framing.
Hillside and split-level homes — South Hill and the bluffs, where the ground floor changes elevation across the footprint and “which floor is the main floor” is genuinely debatable.

Each of those has a characteristic answer, and it’s usually not the same one.

The five things that actually decide it

When we walk a home, we’re answering five questions in roughly this order. If the first three work, you almost certainly have a viable project.

1. Is there a clear vertical path?

This is the big one, and it’s where Spokane’s older homes differ most from newer construction.

In houses built from about the 1990s onward, the standard elevator retrofit is a stacked closet — a closet on the main floor sitting directly under a closet upstairs. Cut the floor between them, and you have most of a shaft. It’s clean, it’s cheap, and it barely touches the living space.

The catch is that stacking closets simply wasn’t a design convention in older homes. Walk a 1912 bungalow and you’ll find closets that are small, few, and placed wherever the room layout wanted them — almost never one above another. So the free vertical chase that makes newer retrofits easy usually doesn’t exist here.

What we look for instead, roughly in order of how disruptive it is:

A pantry, mudroom, or back-hall corner that lines up with a bedroom closet or hall above
The dead space beside a staircase — often the single best candidate, because stairs already establish a vertical corridor
A corner of a large main-floor room, giving up floor area in exchange for not touching structure
An exterior bump-out — a small shaft addition on an outside wall, which leaves the interior almost entirely intact and is often the right answer in a home with valuable original woodwork

A useful trick

Stand in your basement and look straight up. Then stand on the second floor in the same spot. If you can trace a path roughly 4 ft by 5 ft that doesn’t hit a stair, a chimney, a bathroom, or a main beam, you likely have a shaft location — and you’ve done most of the feasibility work yourself.

2. Is there enough overhead at the top landing?

An elevator needs headroom above the top floor it serves — typically somewhere in the range of 8 to 9 feet of overhead measured from the top landing, depending on the equipment and cab height.

In a two-story home with standard ceilings and attic above, that’s usually fine. Where it gets tight is exactly where Spokane bungalows live: a 1½-story house with a low-pitch roof, knee walls, and dormers. Serve the upper floor of one of those and the overhead requirement may run straight into the rafters.

It’s not automatically a dealbreaker — there’s equipment designed to work with limited overhead, and shaftless through-floor lifts sidestep the requirement almost entirely — but it’s the constraint that most often changes which elevator you end up with.

3. What’s happening at the bottom?

Most traditional elevators need a pit — a shallow recess below the lowest landing, generally in the range of 6 to 12 inches, so the car can come flush with the floor.

Spokane homes overwhelmingly have full or daylight basements, which is good news for equipment placement and complicated news for the pit. If the basement is the lowest landing, that pit means cutting and excavating a recess in the basement slab. That’s routine work, but it opens real questions: how close is the footing, what’s the soil like, and is there any history of water down there?

Groundwater in the pit is one of the most common ways a retrofit budget gets away from people. A pit that takes on water corrodes the equipment sitting in the lowest point of the building. If your basement has ever been damp, say so early — it changes the design, and it’s far cheaper to solve before the slab is cut than after.

Some equipment needs no pit at all. Pneumatic vacuum elevators and several shaftless designs sit directly on the finished floor, which is often the reason they win in an older home.

4. Will the electrical service carry it?

A traditional home elevator typically wants a dedicated 230-volt circuit in the 30-amp range — more for heavy-duty units — plus a separate lighting and receptacle circuit for the car and machine space.

In a 2005 house, that’s a spare breaker. In a 1925 house that’s never had a service upgrade, it may be most of the remaining capacity in a 100-amp panel that’s already running a furnace, a range, and a heat pump. A panel or service upgrade is a common line item on Spokane retrofits, and it’s better to price it in from the start than to discover it during rough-in.

5. What is the house actually framed like?

The last question is structural, and it’s the one where older Spokane homes earn their reputation.

Balloon framing is common in pre-1930 construction — wall studs run continuously from the sill all the way to the roof rather than stopping at each floor. It changes how an opening gets cut and headed off, and it’s a reason we bring a structural engineer in early rather than late.
Plaster and lath makes demolition messier and patching harder than drywall, and in homes of this vintage the finishes themselves may be worth protecting.
Load-bearing walls in older homes are frequently not where a modern floor plan would put them. This is not guesswork territory.

None of this is exotic. It’s normal old-house work. It just means the honest scope is “elevator plus carpentry plus electrical,” not “elevator.”

Which type of elevator fits which Spokane house

Once we know the five answers above, the equipment choice mostly makes itself:

Your situation	Usually the right fit
Post-war ranch or newer, basement available for equipment, clear chase	Hydraulic — smoothest ride, highest capacity, most customizable
Older home, no usable chase, don’t want to open up structure	Pneumatic vacuum — no pit, no shaft, no machine room, installs in days
Two stops, tight footprint, no basement to give up	Shaftless / through-floor — no pit excavation, minimal construction
No supporting wall to build against	Self-supporting drum drive on its own rails
Three or more stops but nowhere for a machine room	Machine-room-less traction — equipment lives in the hoistway
Bungalow with a low-pitch roof over the top landing	Reduced-overhead or through-floor equipment

Worth saying plainly: hydraulic is the best-riding and most flexible residential elevator, and also the most demanding on an existing structure. It wants a pit, overhead, and somewhere to put a power unit. In a 1915 Craftsman with an 8-foot basement ceiling and a full panel, it may be the right answer only if you’re already opening the house up. We’d rather tell you that at the walkthrough than at rough-in. If you want the detail, we wrote a whole piece on hydraulic home elevators.

What a retrofit costs compared to new construction

The equipment costs the same either way. The difference is entirely in the construction around it — and that gap can be substantial. National estimates put a difficult retrofit at up to several times the installed cost of the same elevator planned into a new build, though that’s a ceiling rather than a typical figure.

The more useful way to think about it: your elevator price is fairly predictable, and your construction price is the variable. A stair-side installation in a post-war ranch with a good panel might add very little. An exterior shaft addition on a Browne’s Addition Victorian, with a pit cut into an old basement and a service upgrade, is a different project entirely.

For full pricing context, see how much a home elevator costs in Spokane.

Don’t forget permitting

Washington regulates residential elevators specifically, and — unusually — the City of Spokane issues its own elevator permits rather than the state. Plan review takes weeks, not days, so permitting should start when the project is signed, not when equipment ships. We cover the whole process on our Washington home elevator installation page.

How long it takes

Two clocks run at once, and the elevator is rarely the slow one.

Permitting and plan review — weeks, and it starts as soon as we have a design. This usually sets the earliest possible start date.
Construction — framing the shaft, cutting openings, pit work, electrical. In a retrofit this is the dominant schedule item and depends entirely on your house.
Equipment installation — comparatively fast once the shaft is ready. A pneumatic unit can go in within a few days; a traditional elevator takes longer but is still measured in days, not months.

When we tell people not to do it

We’d rather lose the job than sell the wrong one. There are homes where an elevator is the wrong answer:

You only need to solve the stairs. If the goal is getting between two floors and there’s a usable staircase, a stairlift does that for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the construction. Read the elevator vs. stairlift comparison before you commit.
The only viable shaft location destroys the house. In some homes the only clear path runs straight through the feature that makes the home worth staying in.
The timeline doesn’t work. If someone’s coming home from a hospital stay in three weeks, an elevator is not the answer to that problem. A stairlift often is, and the elevator conversation can happen afterward.

Find out what your house can take

We’ll walk your home, check the five things above, and tell you honestly whether an elevator makes sense — and which kind. No pressure, no charge.