BEFORE:
When we purchased our 1974 A-Frame in the Catskills back in March of 2021, our immediate thought was “how are we going to get more natural light into this space?” We’ve never had this issue before in any of our previous homes, because we have always been super specific about only purchasing or renting homes with nice natural light. I really believe that natural light has a huge impact on my moods, and I feel it is a necessity in my daily life. This home was a different story, because we were so dead-set on finding a home with an A-frame roofline, so we were willing to budge on this huge must-have knowing we could renovate in the future. We tossed around a lot of ideas, like possibly opening up the living room and cutting back half of the upstairs to get some large windows into the front of the house, but ultimately we decided we wanted to extra space upstairs, and we were worried from an engineering standpoint about how large of a job that would be. We decided on adding tons of skylights (9 to be exact) and it has been the greatest decision we’ve made for our home. It’s a really simple + quick solution to adding a ton of natural light into your home!
We opted to add 9 VELUX No Leak Solar Powered “Fresh Air” Skylights. They provide natural light, but they also can be opened with a remote control or smartphone app to create air flow in the room below. They have a rain sensor that closes the skylight at the first sign of bad weather and are solar powered, so no wiring was required during installation. They included blinds that we can control from our phones. On the day of the skylight install (you can look up local installers near you here), I kept saying “this is the best day of my life” haha and truthfully, it was in my top ten. It was so incredible seeing the home I love so much be completely transformed. The entire install took 3 days total, because we also replaced our roof in the process. In our upstairs bedroom we added a VELUX top-hinged roof window, which opens wide (maximum 45 degrees) enough to provide a point of egress as required by your local building code (all bedrooms should have two points of egress in the event of a fire). The roof window is operated manually and has a manually controlled shade – we did this so that we could remove 1 of the upstairs balconies to show the true shape of the home more.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
There’s so many benefits with the addition of our 9 new skylights, but some of my favorite things are:
Here’s tons more BEFORE + AFTER photos below, and if you have been thinking about skylights for your own home, you can look up a VELUX installer near you here!
BEFORE:
AFTER:
BEFORE:
AFTER:
