Reframing roof and removing second story

2 months ago

Hi, sorry for any bad phrasing, english is not my first language.

I live in Quebec, Canada. 5 years ago we bought our old house (1930). She need a lot of love! We are renovating it on spare time. Our next big project is to reframe the roof line. It is currently a hip roof, in the winter, the snow fall from the original house roof on the extension and cause problem with all the weight. We were thinking of a gable roof for the orinigal house but keeping the roof as it is for the extension.

We also need to do something with the back porch.

We are not using the second story at all and it is a big waste of energy in the winter so we wanted to remove the second story all together while redoing the roof. If we keep the second story, the windows need to be replace, the stair is in the way for other project inside and all the walls and flooring should be worked on.

We do a majority of all the work ourselves and my family work in construction. But we get a lot of mix feelings regarding our project. This is our forever home, we bought it because of the land, not the house so the question of the house value is not in our mind. I would like to have some outside opinion on our project!

Tell me if you need more infos!

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Comments (3)

Sigrid
2 months ago
My take is you have an old house, with cheaper, less well-built additions. I would not remove the upper story of the house to keep the additions. I would be more inclined to remove the poorly built additions and keep the main house. It looks like a nice, classic four square.

My old house has a steep roof at the top and a shallow porch roof around the house. Large amounts of snow fall from the upper roof with force and land on the porch roof. Our house is well-built, so LOTS of snow can sit on the porch roof with no problem. Big chunks of snow can fall at high speed onto the porch roof with no problem.
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Joseph Corlett, LLC
2 months ago
Removing the second story is a bad idea. You could probably build new more cost effectively.
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3onthetree
2 months ago
It should be the other way around - the stick on additions should be removed and the original 2 story house should be remodeled. Not quite sure about the snow and weight either, a hip roof is basically a gable on 4 sides, a gable still sheds snow off of 2 planes, a hip on 4 planes. If you have a problem with weight or sliding, the metal roof and framing sizes are to blame. There are fixes for that, and cutting off the top floor of a balloon framed house is not one that pops up in normal conversation.

I would suggest if you only bought for the land and do not live in this house as it was intended and it doesn't meet your needs, then build a separate ranch on this land.
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