A Blast from the Past - Shed Dormer Construction

So with kitchen stuff being the only thing going on in the real world, I thought it would be a good time to take a peek at some of the stuff around here that happened in the years before the blog.

Today we're revisiting probably the BIGGEST and most ambitious project we did.  And it's one of the first, but it's the precursor to everything on the 2nd floor of the house.  We added a big shed dormer on the back of the house.

Our home is a brick Cape Cod style house, which means that there is a full first floor, but the 2nd floor is contained within the roof line.  The front of the house has cute little dormers but the back of the house had no windows.  The bedrooms upstairs also sported these little knee walls and slanted ceilings.  It's a cozy feel, but we wanted more space.

Our shed dormer basically changed the angle of the back side of the roof all the way across the back of the house.  We wanted to move the knee wall back to the back of the house to increase square footage in the upstairs bedrooms.  Let me see if I can draw you guys a pic...

See how much more space there is in that enclosed shape?  So that's what we did.  And by "we" I mean Jason & his brother.

Now to put a time-frame around this, we closed on the house in early January 2007 and this project was "done" (meaning that the exterior of the house was weatherproof LOL) before we moved in at the end of March.  So that means that Jason & his brother worked on this - tearing off the roof, cutting holes in the walls, framing, sheathing, siding, etc.  in FEBRUARY.  And let me say that it was wicked cold.  It snowed inside the house.  I don't have any pics of this process that I can find because I was at our apartment with a wee baby all cozy and warm.

Anyway, here's a pic from the following spring with everything tidied up outside:

And here's a look at a few interior angles - just to show how much more square footage was added.  If you look at the bedroom shot, you can see the corner of the doorway in each pic to see how much more space there is now.

So there it is - the shed dormer.  Now that we see how we changed the profile of the house we can now take a look at the bathroom and upstairs bedrooms in future "Blast From the Past" posts!!

Have a great weekend!