If you have been following the blog posts, you may remember that our house design is height challenged. Because of the zone that the house is located in, there is a maximum height for the house measured from the lowest point of the ground at the basement wall to the highest point of the peak of the roof. Our lot is sloped, so while at the front of the house the basement is almost completely below ground, at the back of the house, the basement is not underground at all.

Because of the height limitation, we have been forced to have the roof lower than optimal, which means that most of the rooms on the second floor have places where the ceiling slopes down. For example, this is the second floor family room.

We have recently decided that we were not going to extend the basement under the porch. The ground under the porch will be crushed gravel and open to the back yard. We will probably put a kayak rack there and store our boats under the porch. Well, by not enclosing this area, the lowest point on the basement actually moved to the West and uphill a little. This ground level at this new lowest point is now 2 inches higher then the at previous lowest point, which means we can raise the roof by 2 inches.

But before we got too excited by idea of reducing the encroachment of the roof into the second floor rooms, we got the results of our HERS (Home Energy Rating System) score, and the architect realized that we need to add an extra 2 inches of insulation to the roof. So no interior change at all.

The regulatory gods giveth and the regulatory gods taketh away.

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