Thanks Brandon! No the house did not have vaulted ceilings! When you walked in you could take 4-5 steps up to another level, but it was all flat 8' ceilings. Here's the before photo of the exterior - big difference!

Wow! Ok I'm taking this to my contractor and demanding this vaulting in our remodel lol. It must have been some pretty complicated engineering?

I hope that is possible for you! Having some variance in ceiling height like vaulting or switching from 9' to 11' ceilings is a great way to define spaces while leaving the floorplan open. For this home, we actually gutted quite a bit to transform it. We were able to leave most exterior walls, some of the interior lower level and a few of the interior main level walls, but completely removed the roof to do so, which gave us a lot of flexibility to create that vault. So the blueprints and engineering definitely took some time and detail to make this happen!