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Small Cabin Forum / General Forum / Convert open loft into legal Bedroom
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gerryc123
Member
# Posted: 4 May 2022 12:11am - Edited by: gerryc123
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Hello,
I hope I am in the right section. I just registered so forgive me if I am in the wrong place.
I just purchased a log cabin in Greenwood Lake NY. The previous owner had two tiny bedrooms on the main floor in order to classify the cabin as a 2 bedroom. The cabin has a second floor open loft which looks down on the main floor and I wish to convert this to a bedroom thus having one bedroom downstairs and one upstairs. Since the home was purchased as a two bedroom, I am being pressured by my lender to keep it that way for appraisal value but I do not want the second bedroom to be downstairs. Is there a direction someone can point me "code wise" with a roadmap on how to do this. The space of the upstairs loft is 300 ft and I intended on putting in a spiral staircase to access the upstairs but I do not want to put up partitions or close it in whatsoever. Any suggestions???
Thank you for your help!!

Brettny
Member
# Posted: 4 May 2022 07:32am
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Ask the town.
In NY you will need at bare minimum a egress window in each bedroom.

Janemarie
Member
# Posted: 17 Jul 2022 10:04pm
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I am curious about your spiral staircase. In my cabin, the loft has a horrible staircase that is going to kill me someday. Thinking of getting a spiral staircase.

gcrank1
Member
# Posted: 17 Jul 2022 11:19pm
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Fwiw, the 2 spiral staircases I had occasion to use were
not as 'space efficient' as I would have liked. The one that was fairly easy to use took up a pretty big bit of floor space top and bottom, the other was a tighter curl, so less loss of floorspace, but very hard to negotiate (and I was much more 'trim and fit' then. My wife didnt like them either.
We kept using the sort of 'ships ladder stairs' for our cabin loft. I was going to angle it out a bit more and have bigger treads on the rebuild, but it got sold.

toyota_mdt_tech
Member
# Posted: 18 Jul 2022 08:10am - Edited by: toyota_mdt_tech
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Bedroom must have a closet and an ingress/egress or way out, this if its a window can only be so far from the floor, maybe 32 or 34 inches? And so wide. I know there may be another code for headroom, so tall etc to be considered living space. This doesnt mean the entire area, but at least towards the middle. Dormers, especially shed type can help to give you more headspace total area. A dormer window could get you the egress window too. One on each side of the ridge, (((boom))) 2 bedrooms upstairs.

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