The cheapest landin Denver isabove your roof.
Second storeys and pop-tops on Front Range houses that were built for one floor. Whether your walls and footings can carry another is an engineering question, and it comes before the price.
You keep the garden, the trees and the address.
On a Front Range lot where setbacks, easements and covenants have already decided how much footprint you are allowed, going up is frequently the only direction left. It costs you nothing in garden, and it keeps the mature trees and the driveway exactly as they are.
It is also the addition with the least room for error, because everything you add lands on walls and footings designed for a single storey and a light roof. A new floor is not just its own weight — it is the framing, the finishes, the furniture, the people, and a new roof carrying a Colorado snow load above all of it.
Three things get examined before anything else: whether the existing walls can carry the load and where new posts must land, whether the footings and foundation have the bearing capacity, and whether there is a continuous load path from the new roof down to the soil. Older houses surprise people here.
Six things a pop-top asks of a house.
Structural assessment
Walls, footings and load path, answered by an engineer before anyone attaches a number to the job.
The dry-in window
The weeks between the roof coming off and the new structure being sealed. Sequencing, not carpentry, is the risk.
The stair
It has to come from somewhere inside the existing plan, and it reshapes the ground floor as much as the new one.
Services upward
Electrical, plumbing and HVAC extended through a finished house to a floor that did not exist.
Matching new to old
Ceiling heights, window heads, roof pitch and siding lines have to agree with a house that already exists.
Upper decks
Often the reason for the whole project, and a structural element in their own right.
Going up is not automatically better than going out. If you have usable lot left and no setback problem, a ground-level addition is usually simpler and cheaper per square foot. A contractor who recommends a pop-top before looking at your lot and your foundation is selling, not advising.
A brick ranch that spent a few weeks with no lid.
The Lakewood pop-top documented on this site took the roof off a single-storey brick ranch, put a full floor on the existing walls, and reworked the ground floor underneath. The original red brick stays visible below the new siding — an honest join reads better than a disguised one, and it costs less than trying to match forty-year-old brick.
The Denver pop-top went further again. The roof came off a brick bungalow, a full second storey was framed above the original ground-floor brick, and a two-bedroom ADU went up over a new detached garage on the alley at the same time. That one is photographed from the first morning of demolition through to the finished street elevation — the winter the framed storey stood weather-tight, the salvaged brick stacked in the front yard, the trenching that made the ADU a real dwelling, and the before and after from the same spot on the pavement.
Ask any builder quoting your pop-top what their dry-in window is and what happens if it rains on day three. The quality of that answer tells you most of what you need to know.
Six steps, and the first one is a phone call.
Discovery call
A short call to understand the project, the property and whether we are the right fit.
Job walk
We look at what is actually standing — structure, services, access.
Design
Drawings worked through with you, so you approve a plan rather than imagine one.
Engineering & permitting
Structural engineering and the permit set, handled by us.
Construction
One project manager, and a job site kept clean because you usually still live here.
Walkthrough
We finish the list you write, not the one we think is left.
Ask us whether your house can go up.
We will look at what is standing, what your walls and footings can carry, and what your lot and zoning allow — then tell you honestly whether up is the right direction.
Prefer to talk now? Call (720) 637-2060
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