Thanks. Truth is I wasn’t asking for anything beyond the question in the OP. It’s not my house or my decision anyway, but I had advised this person to get an engineer and was wondering if I should modify that to “architect”. That’s it.
FWIW, I looked up the info on the county website, and the house was built in 1967; it’s in NJ. The whole house is 1,986 sqf and the basement is listed as 728 sqf. The way it’s laid out is the left side is two floors, colonial style, with full basement, then to the right of that is a section with the crawl space, and then to the right of that there’s a one car garage on a slab. Looks to me like the section with two floors and the basement is 1,624 sqf, which would make the section above the crawl space 362 sqf, a bit bigger than I was assuming.