25 Warren St Jan 2025 application25 Warren St
January 2025 application for exterior vents and skylights
We are doing some interior renovations and in order to receive building permits, we need a Certificate of Appropriateness for the parts of the construction which would impact the exterior
of our home. The proposed changes would be to the east side of the house and to the roof. For the changes to the roof, we would like to replace an existing skylight and add an additional
skylight. For the east side of the house, we would like to add three vents. We will also present an option to remove two non-conforming windows at the same time as the vent work.
Current Exterior Photos and Rendering
The east side of the house is only visible from Warren Street. Here are views from directly outside the house and further down the street. The vents do not currently exist. I circled
the skylight in red because it is difficult to see from the street.
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This is the rendering of the current conditions:
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Skylights
There is currently a skylight that opens that has interior dimensions of approximately 19” wide by 27” tall. (I don’t know the exterior dimensions and I don’t know how much it protrudes
from the roof because given the way our luck goes with this house if I opened the window to measure I might not get it closed and I don’t want another problem.)
We would like to replace the existing skylight with a black fixed, deck mounted, Velux skylight Model D06, which has an exterior frame size of 23.25” x 46.25”. We would also like to
install the same skylight model next to the current skylight, which would look like this:
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The additional skylight would be the same distance from the edge of the roof and X inches toward the north side of the house.
The skylight product sheet is submitted as an attachment to the application.
Proposed Vents
We need to install three new vents on the east side of the house. (There are no existing vents.) The proposed locations are shown in the rendering above. We informed our contractor
that we needed to install vents that were the least visually disruptive as possible. He suggested the low profile flat panel vents shown in the data sheet attached to the application.
They are roughly square (6.5” x 6.45”) and protrude from the house approximately 1 inch. He said that they are able to be painted to match the existing trim.
As an alternative, the contractor said that if you would prefer, it would be possible to eliminate the vent located on the left on the second floor and instead use a soffit vent.
As another alternative, we propose removing the two mismatched windows at this time, which would make the east side of the house look like this:
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This would be my preference. An architect we worked with stated that the windows would not have been original to the house. I cannot find any old photographs of that side of the house
to confirm that. However, given the symmetrical nature of the other windows on the west side of the house, which all match in size to the remaining windows above, it seems reasonable
to conclude that.
If we remove the windows, we would use the same siding to blend in with the current siding. (We are removing it from the front and west sides of the house and could save some for this
project.)