Exterior House Renovations: Let's Talk Dormers!

We (Kyle and I) are in the early stages of planning an exterior renovation on our home, a 3-bedroom, traditional cape style house. Our two primary goals for this exterior renovation are to make our son's room bigger and to add a 4th bedroom for guests and office space. As we start to think about what this will actually look like from a curb appeal standpoint, and the functionality we need inside, there are a few things I know for sure.

Hipped Roof or Doghouse Dormer Style

One, we don't want hipped roof dormers. These can be cute when done well, but they don't add a ton of interior space, and so won't accomplish our goals. What is a hipped roof dormer? This is the very traditional and probably most common way to dormer a house, especially a Cape style home. It consists of four sloping sides that come together in a peak. It provides a little bit of space inside, and more light through windows. If this is your goal, I love these homes with hipped roof dormers:

Shed Dormer Style

Two, while a shed dormer provides the most amount of space, we already have a shed dormer on the back of the house, and I don't want to just mimic that on the front, for curb-appeal purposes. A shed dormer is one roof face that runs perpendicular to the roof. It can extend across the entire house, or be broken up into smaller sections. If we somehow do end up with a standard shed dormer, I would want to add a porch roof to increase curb appeal. Check out these shed dormer inspiration homes I love:

Other Dormer Styles

A gabled dormer is similar to the hip roofed dormer, but only has two roof sides that comes together in a peak.

Eyebrow Dormers and Arched Top dormers use roofing shingles to curve around the eaves of the house. These are beautiful, and I love the idea of incorporating them into the final look.

What We are Doing

While we don't have the final design plans yet (more to come on that!) I love the idea of incorporating a few of these dormer styles to accomplish our perfect exterior. One that is beautiful from the street, makes our home look bigger from the outside, and gives us the room we need on the inside!

Here are some of the exterior inspiration images we sent our draftsman...