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:

The Start of Something Big

 I'm honestly not sure how to start a post that is months in the making of our new planned addition. We've gone through so many iterations of our idea and I want to go step-by-step through them, but I also don't want to wait forever for the final reveal. So excuse me if I seem a little scattered.

The background to this project was the inspiration we got from visiting family last Christmas. They had gutted the inside of their home, remodeled it, and added on a beautiful primary suite. While we were absolutely certain that any major project for us had to factor in us continuing to live in our house during construction, we thought there were probably some things we could do. There was just no way we were willing to rent a place and move out for a few months--that felt like too much. That meant no major additions in the main living space, especially since the kitchen and dining room overlook the backyard above the walk-up basement stairs (meaning a pop-out in that direction would require somehow rerouting the basement). So while we would LOVE a completely new, larger kitchen (rather than the cosmetic refresh we did 5 year ago), it wasn't something we would want to live through.

We realized that the office and guest rooms could easily be avoided for a few months if necessary, and decided to focus on what we could do in that area. We consulted a few design experts and arrived at the idea that expanding into the backyard through the office would offer us extra space without totally disrupting our lives during construction. We are only doing one floor of construction, rather than build up a second story, again to avoid having to totally move out of the upstairs for a while. 

And so, I present our current plan: a primary suite (bedroom and bathroom) off the office, expanding into the backyard. It will have a small deck that steps down to connect the space to our current patio.

Here is the zoomed-in view of the new part:

You can see from this picture that we're really getting into the structural design phase, so ignore all that extra stuff. The main idea is that from the office, you step down into a hallway (the step is because our yard slopes downward, so this reduces how high they have to build the foundation) with a bathroom on one side and a toilet/powder room on the other (more on why we did that in a future post). Then the bedroom is at the end of the hallway. It has wardrobe-style closets built into the wall, set off from the main bedroom by a floor-to-ceiling partial wall, then a large open room (king-sized bed, here we come!) that opens up onto a small deck.

Here's what it will look like from the top. I'll write a whole post on the roof angles soon, but this just gives you an idea of the overhead view.

And here it is looking at the house from the back yard. 

With this giant addition in square feet (516 sq. ft.!), it's funny to me that we don't actually get to say we're adding a bedroom, since the office (which currently counts as a 4th bedroom), will become an antechamber/sitting room/whatever into our new suite, so it can't continue to count as its own bedroom. This doesn't matter to us, but is annoying for if/when we ever sell. Still, we'll gain an extra bathroom and a huge new, modern addition, even if it will still be considered a 4-bedroom home.

The addition opens up lots of other follow-on possibilities for us, which we'll certainly be documenting in painstaking detail over the next year or so. Most importantly, and one of the reasons we're doing this addition, is that the kids will each get their own room upstairs, essentially taking over the top floor just in time for them to become moody tweens who don't want their parents around.

A word on timelines before I close this post out--we started talking with architects and came up with our initial designs last spring. Then we paused the discussions as we worked out our financing plan and just because of other life priorities. That turned out to be a good idea because it gave us the summer to rethink some of our design ideas and come back in the fall with some new thoughts. As I go room by room in more detail, I'll show you some of our early ideas and how we arrived at what we think is mostly our final decisions.

And get ready for tons and tons of pictures of bathroom tiles and paint swatches.