Cherry St. — Newton

The Cherry St. attic was a sixty-inch knee-wall crawlspace used for storage. The owners wanted a bedroom, a three-quarter bath, and a closet big enough to be useful. The existing stair was a pull-down ladder in a hallway ceiling — not usable as a permanent stair under code, so we rebuilt it from the second-floor hallway up to a new landing.

We added two shed dormers to pick up headroom on the east side of the house. Rafters got sistered with two-by-ten stock to give a full ten inches of insulation depth — batt plus rigid foam at the roof plane, which is the only way to make a finished attic perform in a New England winter. The bath sits above the existing plumbing wall, so the drain and vent stack reused the existing chase.

Heating is a retrofit ducted mini-split fed from a cassette in the new closet. The bedroom gets a full-wall window on the back dormer. Final inspection cleared with no punch items. The stair rebuild ate three weeks of the twelve-week scope but added a proper banister that actually matched the rest of the house.