Raise the roof

In trying to think of how to talk about all the components to our addition, I thought I'd break it up into a few different topics to make more manageable blog posts. This is where I'll walk through our decisions from the early phase to today (and by today, I mean the phase where we are literally in the final approval before it all goes off for permitting! Eek!).

I figured the best place to start was at the literal top, so here's the post where I'll talk about our roof--the planned roofline, the materials, and everything related to the top view of the new space. For several reasons, we knew pretty quickly in the process that we didn't want a traditional gabled roof (a gabled roof is the roof that comes to a point at the center. It's what you probably think of when you think of a "roof" --the leftmost one below):

Why not? Well, first, and a common theme that will come up with this addition, is that we don't want to attempt to match our current house too closely, and, most likely, fail miserably. Our house was build over 70 years ago, and trying to make an addition that looks original is going to fall short, probably in a really ugly way. "Matching" brick and slate and other components will make everything look just slightly...off. So we don't really want to try. The other reason is this:

Here's the view from the back of an addition with a gabled roof (ignore other things like the covered roof/porch--that's a different post). Now take a look at our three upstairs windows (here's the current view, to refresh your memory):

See how you can't see two of the windows once we add the new addition? Yeah. Imagine what the view likes like from inside...Who doesn't love a view of a roof?

Now check out the same view, with a shed roof. See how much more visible the upper story windows are? But we weren't done yet...

That shed roof was the planned designed for a while, since last spring when we came up with our "let's pause this for now" plans. But one of my main concerns was how bright it would be in our future bedroom, and how expensive the window dressing would be that we would need to block that extra light. In addition to that upper level of slanted quadrilaterals on the edge you can see from the above view, there was also this set of extra windows above the doors that look out onto our patio. It seems silly to pay extra for more windows when we want the bedroom to be relatively dark and would therefore have to find expensive solutions to cover them. Enter: the final roof design!

We arrived at this after a few more attempts to find the right way to angle the vault:

This one still had enough space on the porch side that we had to include windows there, defeating some of the point of the new drop. It also just looked ugly.

This one looked fine but by moving the high point so far into the room, we felt like we would lose some of the airy/lofty effect of the ceiling opening up from the bed wall, since the ceiling starts descending before it gets as high, and right over the bed rather than past it.

Here's the finally roof design from the patio view, as well (you can tell it's from much later in the design process, when we're getting into the nitty gritty for permitting). Yet another reason we liked angling the roof back down a little was to get some roof line back into view here. Otherwise it was just a rather imposing wall of (many) windows:

And so with a final roof slope for the addition in mind, let's talk materials. We've now gotten to the point where we have a "spec sheet" with brand names "or equivalent" to price out with contractors. So we already know our roof will be a Berridge Tee-Panel standing seam metal roof. It's hard to talk roof color without talking about siding, and we're not there yet, but I think based on our siding choices (next time, maybe), we're going to go with a lighter gray roof, maybe Zinc Gray or Cityscape. The hope is that a lighter color might get less hot and and ideally, we'll get a pretty close match to our current gray house siding. We'll hopefully get to see some swatches in person. We've asked for it to be well insulated both for energy and also sound purposes (rain on a metal roof--peaceful? or deafening?).

A note on the part of the addition where the bathroom and hallway are--what the architects are calling "the hyphen": that part will match the addition in material (i.e. be a metal roof) shaped in a traditional gable centered over the middle. The only CAD view we have of that is from above: