When we bought the house (now 2.5 years ago!!!), one of the improvements that Caroline and I talked about was putting a dormer on the 3rd floor when we moved upstairs, something we planned on doing in the 5-7 year range. The dormer would most importantly add a 2nd bathroom in the upstairs unit, not required but really nice to have in a four bedroom unit. In addition, the current bathroom is on the 2nd floor while 3 of the bedrooms are on the 3rd floor. It'd be a lot more convenient to have a bathroom on the same floor as most of the bedrooms.
True to form, even though we haven't finished the 1st floor apartment yet, we decided to do the dormer early! Interest rates were really low, and house appreciation in our neighborhood gave us the ability to refinance and take money out to pay for the dormer. We won't be moving up there next year, but we will be getting enough additional rent to cover the higher mortgage cost.
We shopped around for contractors (I couldn't do the job fast enough as I've got tenants up there), and picked a guy (Steve) who lives only a few houses down from us. After several conversations, he convinced us that it would be best if the dormer went from the front staircase to the rear staircase. This made sense, as our current staircases don't meet code (they are too short). Of course, this meant that the dormer, instead of being bathroom sized, was now going to be 34 feet long, only 5 feet shorter than the entire house length! Caroline wasn't wild about the "train on top of the house", but it does make a lot of sense to get the 3rd floor up to modern code. Plus, then we have room for the laundry and a closet!
After originally thinking that we could copy the 1st floor bathroom, we found that the 3rd floor hallway is actually 2 feet closer to the future dormer wall than on the lower two floors! This put us in to a true engineering mode, creating a scale drawing and working through all of the permutations of possible bathroom configurations. We ended up with the below design, which has a pretty long and narrow (5ftx12ft) bathroom, but also a very nice laundry area and a good sized closet. The closet may get even deeper (the depth of the stairs), depending on how it looks when everything is torn out.
There is actually another large window above the laundry which isn't in the drawing. We wanted to make sure we got enough light in to the hallway.
After a lot of ups and downs with the inspectional services department (seriously, I was told many times that I couldn't build the apartment for various reasons - all turned out to be false) we got our permit last Friday! We wanted to start work on Monday (5 days ago), but Steve had planned another short job due to the permitting delay. He started putting stuff up on Thursday, but this coming Monday will be his first big work day, demolishing the interior!
We'll keep everyone posted about the progress as it unfolds! We are pretty excited, as it should transform the house in a matter of weeks.
True to form, even though we haven't finished the 1st floor apartment yet, we decided to do the dormer early! Interest rates were really low, and house appreciation in our neighborhood gave us the ability to refinance and take money out to pay for the dormer. We won't be moving up there next year, but we will be getting enough additional rent to cover the higher mortgage cost.
We shopped around for contractors (I couldn't do the job fast enough as I've got tenants up there), and picked a guy (Steve) who lives only a few houses down from us. After several conversations, he convinced us that it would be best if the dormer went from the front staircase to the rear staircase. This made sense, as our current staircases don't meet code (they are too short). Of course, this meant that the dormer, instead of being bathroom sized, was now going to be 34 feet long, only 5 feet shorter than the entire house length! Caroline wasn't wild about the "train on top of the house", but it does make a lot of sense to get the 3rd floor up to modern code. Plus, then we have room for the laundry and a closet!
After originally thinking that we could copy the 1st floor bathroom, we found that the 3rd floor hallway is actually 2 feet closer to the future dormer wall than on the lower two floors! This put us in to a true engineering mode, creating a scale drawing and working through all of the permutations of possible bathroom configurations. We ended up with the below design, which has a pretty long and narrow (5ftx12ft) bathroom, but also a very nice laundry area and a good sized closet. The closet may get even deeper (the depth of the stairs), depending on how it looks when everything is torn out.
There is actually another large window above the laundry which isn't in the drawing. We wanted to make sure we got enough light in to the hallway.
After a lot of ups and downs with the inspectional services department (seriously, I was told many times that I couldn't build the apartment for various reasons - all turned out to be false) we got our permit last Friday! We wanted to start work on Monday (5 days ago), but Steve had planned another short job due to the permitting delay. He started putting stuff up on Thursday, but this coming Monday will be his first big work day, demolishing the interior!
We'll keep everyone posted about the progress as it unfolds! We are pretty excited, as it should transform the house in a matter of weeks.
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