BEFORE THE ARCHITECT – CUSTOM HOUSE PLAN DESIGN CONCEPT DRAWINGS

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Designer House Plan – Second Additions

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As background, the Autocad Granddad is creating custom house plan design Concept Drawings for a home remodel of major scope based on a designer house plan by Before The Architect. Colonial house additions and plans galore.  Initially, the focus of this designer house plan was on front-face custom house plan design concept drawings — more like a spectacular facelift.  Then we moved to the backside for more house remodeling — major room addition plans involving kitchen remodeling and kitchen custom floor plans,  a family room addition (these days, living room designs are more and more morphing into family room designs), and a master bedroom addition.  (Much later on there will be a dining room redesign, a master bath remodeling of significant proportions once room use switches around and in lieu of choosing to remodel a small bathroom, and, possibly, two-story garage building plans for the far future with the potential for garage attic remodeling to further extend the upper floor living spaces.) 

This colonial house designs will entirely transform the look and workings of this residence.  And time will run on with this project because it is in large part a do-it-yourself home renovation, where the Autocad Granddad draws house design ideas and house remodeling ideas wall-by-wall, room-by-room, and the owners pitch in with their home renovation ideas and their labor.

This Colonial remodeling has other home building design plans featured throughout the website in —

The owners have two problems with the house:

1. Visually dull curbside appeal;

2. Too small inside for them to enjoy the pleasures of home ownership and babies to come.

We are well underway on other renovations to this house.  What's new is that the owners are now considering a garage addition, possibly with a master bedroom atop as a second floor.

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You see, while we scrambled to finish before any real Winter shows up, we got to talking about the backside build out.  That's how this brace of second additions took life.

We wondered what curbside appeal there'd be as between a shed roof extension from the existing ridge backwards versus a gable end roof structure again from the existing ridge.  While we considered the shed roof originally because it appeared simplest, from a structural standpoint it would not turn out that way.  The existing roof structure would have to be beefed up to handle the extra load of another roof on top of it and across its whole length, even if we split the load spans with buildups from the existing backside partitions.  Additionally, those buildups would require as many large holes in the roof's backside as rafters strung.  That's a lot of holes. 

A gabled roof would, on the other hand, leave most of its bearing to the addition's new walls, and require no cut ins to the existing roof.

Shortly thereafter, the subject of two-story garage building plans came up.  Whereas, we had concluded that the shed roof on its own would not only add a grade or two of difficulty relative to the gable roof, we also concluded that the shed roof would not look as good as we approached the house from the West.  The prospect of garage plans could make the appearance issue moot, because the garage elevation blocked any clear, visual shot at the shed roof.  The structural issues still withstand.

In working these thoughts through – and well short of garage blueprints, garage attic remodeling into habitable space consistent with the rest of house, or any other house addition and plans – these are a few more concept drawings to help the old geezer get a grip on home improvement ideas.

Let's get the roof design rolling first.

Two pics - gable roof on the backside, shed roof on the backside.

The second pic looks better; shed roofs are the cheap and easy way to  roof a structure.  But.  The problem with this second pic is not its appearance, it's the pitch of the backside gable.  It's under 4-in-12.  That means it is for all purposes to be dealt with as a flat roof — more roofing materials, more framing, more expense for skylights if we add them.  The AG has designed and built a roof or two with pitches under 4-in-12, and they all worked out just fine.  But if he has a preference for pitches, it's over 4-in-12 rather than under 4-in-12.

What to do?

Raise the backside roof's pitch.

But how?

Go geez.  You go, guy.

Let's try twice more.  First, we'll lift the gable pitch on the backside to the gable pitch existing on the frontside (and the pitch of the roof over the foyer addition).  This'll make the point that seems to elude a lot of folks when increasing length of a gabled roof as measured along its gable end —

or

Here are the results — better than the AG expected.  A 2d front elevation on the left in hidden line shows the backside roof pitched as the other rooflines, and its new ridge rises about 3' over the existing ridge, forming a centered triangle on the existing ridge.  The foyer addition is foremost.  The triangle is the tippity-top of the new backside roofline at gable end, and the rectangle to its right is the addition's chimney chase which had to be lifted 3' to establish minimum safety clearances.  (The red lines on the right side are first passes at the niches.) 

To the right is a shaded image of the same rooflines now in 3d perspective from the left front corner.  This, too, looks much more appealing than forecast.  And from the interior, we now have an approximate maximum 8' of finished ceiling height with which to work (about 3' more than in the existing).

We'll round out this pitch issue with a shed roof on the backside which roof is pitched as the frontside roof; therefore, the back roof's ridge is about 3' over the existing front ridge.

Here it is briefly in a shaded drawing.  The back roof runs over the entirety of the front roof (a clerestory opportunity) along its entirety.  (The AG clipped the width of the backside roof for no good reason he can think of.  More likely, the backside roof in this situation would run completely across the front roof's ridge length.)  This time, the existing chase top had to be raised about 3'.

In shaded 3d perspective, this shed roof override arrangement gets clearer.

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Now comes the workout.  We'll form a two-car garage on the left side of this existing and new structure, using each of these rooflines.  The garage will be drawn at 20' on a side; whereas, later on there may be a need to widen this sucker to, say, 24' minimum to let a staircase construction.

In all cases, we will gable the garage with its ridge in-line to the existing structure.  Initially, the garage will be a single story, and we will set it back about 4' from the front face, about midway back, about 4' from the back face, and at the back face.  Counting the elevations to open this segment of the show, that's 10 pics.  Then, we'll do the same set of three with a two-story (, i.e., master bedroom over the stalls) garage.  That's 10 more pics.  All major pitches will be as existing.  (We'll pair the two rooflines to conserve on page loadtime.)

This is the front elevation in hidden line drawings of the one-story garage attached at left to each of the two rooflines in this study.  It doesn't matter in this view form exactly how far back the garage is from the front face; all the 3d pics to follow look like this in front elevation.

First off of the 3d perspectives – all from the front left corner, all shaded – the garage about 4' back from the front face, then midway, the 4' from the backside, and finally at the backside.

We're making a distinction as to where the garage affixes to the house principally for popular demands and permissible passageways to the house both now with the one-story garage, and next with the two-story structure wherein access to the existing house becomes even more complex as we would prefer such access at both floor levels.  Written in other words, we're prepping options for the custom floor plan work that is sure to follow elsewhere in this website.

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Now let's see the front face elevations with the two-story addition to the left.  Again, from this view form, it doesn't matter how far back we're setting the garage.

Finally, it's off to the races with the four pics of the four positions of the two-story addition placed as above for the one-story addition.  Please note that the AG has not gone to the trouble of altering rooflines at the joining of the backside roof to the garage and master addition.  Such rooflines would need to be altered the more so as the addition moves backwards.  (Indeed, the geezer is not exactly 100% sure he can hang a roofline on the farthest back siting of 2-story addition to the backside gable, and he might be pushing it even with the one 4' from the back corner.)

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Now, the old croak will leave it all up to his clients.  The preliminary conclusions here are that —

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