denver home

This charming brick home built in 1942 has years of family memories for our client, but recently they started to outgrow it. The client wanted to more than double the home's square feet but keep as much of the existing house as possible. As my first residential project, this presented quite a few challenges. The first thing we discovered after I dug into the zoning code was that the existing setback requirements would only allow for a renovation that completely replaced the house. The clients made the call that we would pursue variances with the Board of Adjustments (BOA) to see if we could make their dream home a reality. After months of back-and-forth design with the client getting the layout to fit as many of the client’s wishes as possible, we started the process with the city. Unfortunately, in an early meeting with the administrative adjustment committee, we were told that there were some requests, like changing the primary street, that the BOA would not approve. We took a hard look at our design and what variances we were asking for and adjusted the design to hopefully contain more reasonable requests. In the end, restricting our design made it better and we were finally scheduled to go in front of the Board. Parsing out each zoning violation into a list, we had 11 total. After a very successful hearing, 10 were approved and we only had to make a minor adjustment to the deck above the garage before proceeding with the full construction documents. We have now submitted for the full permit and are working through comments from the city.