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Yes if there is space. You need to add a window for anything you want to call a bedroom. You will probably also need to have a bathroom on that floor to count it as a bedroom from a realestate perspective.

After you have determined that there is enough height and floor space to do it you have to figure out if the ceiling joists for the floor below are strong enough to be floor joists for your new room or rooms. Unless someone was planning rooms in what is now the attic you will probably have to add more and ofter deeper joists to span the same area that is now your ceiling below to be strong enough for a floor in the new room.

Get all that straight and then choose where you are going to put your stairs if they are not already there. They must be real stairs - not a pulldown - and your local building code will probably require that they are somewhere around three feet wide, not too steep, good tread width (around 10 inches), have the right rails, landings at top and bottom, etc. Unless you have a large space to cut into that lines up with where you want to enter the upstairs you will may need to take out a closet or cut into the corner of an adjacent room to fit in the stairwell.

With the floor, roofline, and stairwell defined you can lay out the floor plan. Place dormer windows where you need them to match the room(s) layout, consider skylights too but make sure that you have some normal windows that someone could climb out in case of fire and that they are available for ventilation if desired. In most places there are rules like that to qualify a room as a bedroom and it is not nice to be in any room that does not have a window like that. The kneewall (the short wall at the lower end of a ceiling up against a gabled wall) should be four feet or taller. Pushing that wall out further only makes the wall unusable and brings down the average ceiling height. In my area we have to have an average ceiling height of no less than 7.5 feet for it to count as usable space. That would mean that at attic space with eight foot ceilings and four foot knee walls with a 45 degree pitch on the roof would only be able to have about 25% of their floor space under the slanted part of the ceiling. Raise the height of the middle part of the ceiling and the percentage allowed goes up but so does the amount of slanted part needed to get down to the four foot knee wall. Most roofs are not that steep so the percentage of floor space covered by the slanted roof can go up. You don't want to have much floor space where you have to stoop to walk around though. A bed or desk under the sloped roof is good but the space is not as usable so limit it where you can.

It is also nice to have a door at the top of the stairs (after the landing) so that the hot air in the winter does not all go to the upper floor making the downstairs too cold or the a/c from upstairs all drop to the first floor in the summer making the upstairs too hot.

Plan your electrical, Plumbing, and HVAC as well. In houses with a crawl space below the HVAC system is probably down there and too far away to use. For those with a HVAC system in a closet - you may have enough capacity to open a vent and a return to the upstairs and live off the one system. In most cases you will probably need a separate system - as little as a self contained through the wall system for A/C and heat like many hotels use in each room up to a fully designed split system with heat and A/C (gas or electric).

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Q: Can you expand a gabled roof attic so as to add one or two bedrooms and a bath?
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