Live & Play Twin Cities: Adding Up

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Adding Up

If you're living in an older home with an attic, you could be sitting on a gold mine of usable space. Adding a dormer or two can really add some functional square footage to a home. Attic additions work great for bedrooms, recreation rooms, offices or home theaters.

With some careful planning you can increase the value of your home by adding much sought after square footage. But be sure that you consult an architect so that the addition is in keeping with the style and period of your house. Nothing is more sad for a house than to have an addition that doesn't look like it belongs to the home.

Today we're highlighting some beautiful attic additions with many beautiful, house-enhancing features.

Exterior

When you viewed from the outside, you want your attic addition to look like it was just how the house was originally built. While getting more space is the reason you're doing the addition, don't be so greedy that you ruin the look of the exterior.

Here are some examples of good vs. bad dormer additions.

Shed dormers are nice and I'm sure this one added a lot of space inside. But the relatively flat slope of this dormer roof just doesn't go with the beautifully steeped pitch of the original home.

Here is a dormer which works well with the original steep pitch of the roof.

The original roof of this home already had some hipped-roof dormers that added appeal to the home. They then tacked on this shallow-pitched shed dormer to the home which ruined the look of it.

In this beautiful home, they treated all the dormers with the same roof treatment to add cohesion to the entire look of the house.

Interior

Once you've got your roof lines figured out, you can start crafting your interior spaces to best suit your needs. Attics offer some great features. There is usually potential for a lot of storage under the lower eaves. You can have direct access to a lot of sunlight through skylights. And since you're up in the tree tops, you can usually have long, unobstructed views from the windows.

Here are some our our favorite attic conversions.