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1. For rooms with sloped ceilings, at least 50 percent of the required floor area of the room must have a ceiling height of at least 7 feet (2134 mm) and no portion of the required floor area may have a ceiling height of less than 5 feet (1524 mm).
If that were the case, my former house would have no bedrooms.
Quote:
Originally Posted by North Beach Person
Generally most livability codes require a bedroom to be 10'X10', or some form of 100 sq. ft.
And my current house would have only one instead of four.
That first picture you posted is insane. It looks more like a tree house.
Imagine firefighters having to crawl or stoop in that room to try to safe your kid in a fire.
That's kind of what makes me wonder. Like, if people have things like that featured in national magazines without fear of the house police showing up, it makes me wonder why I need to dither over a difference of like 10 sq ft under headroom requirements even if the rest of the room is workable.
But if I do want to sell the house eventually some day, I suppose I should step to.
Consider resale. Most people would think that's way too small. Most parents realize their children grow bigger.
By "kids" room I meant for a single person occupying a twin bed, only using one dresser, etc. Like, it's never going to be the master suite. I would hope I would know better than to scale for an eternal preschooler.
Maybe I'm just used to having to cram stuff into 9'x8' bedrooms, it seems kind of normal to me. Now that we have a 10'x18' room I don't know what to do with the space.
> I've seen a ton of 9' x 10' and 9' x 9' bedrooms in new construction.
You can call it a bedroom, and people may come to look at it if they think it's a bedroom, but they will make a buying choice based on using it as a closet or an office.
To answer OP- two very small bedrooms would probably be a significant negative compared to one larger one. It would be for me.
For me, if I were looking and had 2 children, 1 son and 1 daughter, 2 small bedroom would be much more of a positive that 1 large bedroom, especially if the children were past the toddler age.
Are there generally requirements for square footage of ceiling heights in bedrooms?
We're in a dormered cape with two bedrooms on the second floor. Each bedroom is approximately 10'x18' but because of the sloped ceilings only about 10'x12' of that space has a regular 7 foot ceiling. (While that might be small for some, to me it still feels large for a bedroom.) I keep debating throwing up a wall, putting in another hallway door, and splitting one of the bedrooms into two 10'x8-9' bedrooms for each of our kids. However in that case each bedroom would only have about 10'x5'-6' of 7 foot headroom. I know that most building codes require at least one wall to be 7' for a habitable room, how does the headroom fit in?
If we were to split the one bedroom into two, I'm not so worried about live-able space, as these would be rooms for kids, there is enough room for a twin bed, small closet, dresser, etc. I'm mostly worried about building code consequences, or potentially resale consequences.*
Thoughts?
*(As an aside for additional context: this is a small house with small rooms - any future buyer who needs a lot of bedroom square footage would not want to buy this house anyway, so I'm not worried about fitting into the current large-scale ideal. In a perfect world we might bump up or bump out to make three larger upstairs bedrooms but financially and logistically we're not ready for that kind of project, whereas we could probably accomplish the room split in a short period of time with minimal disruption. And even after paying an electrician and plumber to add extra lighting and heat the total cost would be in hundreds vs thousands)
Tribe
I hope I understand what you are saying based on the pics and your description. You have what I would call a room with a short ceiling side(s). As I look at the first pic, that would work out fine for a bedroom. Especially for one kid where their "homework/computer" desk goes against the "short ceiling" wall where the 2nd bed is in the pic.
I had friends that had a guest bedroom with a short ceiling wall room in their home. The head of the bed was against the short ceiling wall. My wife always said the room was "cozy".
Once had a FROG (Free Room Over a Garage) that had two short side walls. One tall end had a door to the room, the other tall end had a window. While we never used the room much on one short wall had day bed with a pull out trundle bed under it. The other short wall had an old computer table/computer against it plus an extra dresser against it. We rarely used the room but we did a few times when our sleep over crowd was to big for the other guest bedrooms. The layout worked well.
If that were the case, my former house would have no bedrooms.
The code I referenced is current code.
However, before the ICC was established there were several regional "code councils" (CABO, BOCA, SBCCI, etc.) and they all had similar codes with some minor differences. The NE was probably the most "fractured"- municipalities usually had there "own" code requirements; so it's quite possible that when your house was originally built it could have possibly fallen under a similar code.
Here in the ATL we had SBCCI- and those reg's haven't changed since the early 80's. and in east TX there was CABO. I don't recall the specific requirement because all I ever built was ranches- so kneewalls and "sloped" ceilings were never an issue.
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