I wouldn't drop the windows lower than 8'. The height and where they are placed allow a lot of light into the interior of rooms. Without seeing the exterior image or plans it would be hard to determine if this would make a large difference for your house.
If you shrink a 6' window and then add back a transom it will be much more expensive. Shrinking a 6' window might not meet egress if its a bedroom, but I would check with local code.
If it were me and if it looked correct with the exterior elevations, I would level everything out at 9' I think.
More info, images etc would be helpful. There are some on here that can play with the images to show you what each option would look like. This bunch is awesome!

Jen

I would guess that is a 16" transom.

"Weird" is a subjective opinion. It is not uncommon to have doors and windows at different heights.

The most proper (and most expensive) look in my opinion would be to match the 6-8 or 8ft. line all the way around and add the transoms above. (as per example)

It is also OK to have a door with a transom 9ft. matched to windows at 9ft with no transom.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts Jenny and Chris. We really appreciate it!

I went out to the house to take a few pictures and the doors are currently framed at 6'8". The plan is to move them to 8' this week. That's probably part of the reason that we're having such a hard time picturing the final product because the disparity between the top of the door and top of the window is so great.

If we move the doors to 8" we can't put a transom above the door because it will be too small (header is at 9', so you'd have a very small transom). The exterior elevation (below) has the windows and doors at 8', which is probably what we should do. But there's a part of us that thinks we might regret not putting transoms above all of the windows and doors on the backside of the house.

Rear Elevation (due to code, county wouldn't let us put a garage door in the basement even though its a games room).

Framing in progress (garage door replaced with double french doors in the basement. still need to cut away the sheathing as it appears we're missing a window and door on the basement level).

View from rooms at the back of the house.

Yes I think that keeping an 8' header all the way around will work -and be fairly easy to lower the windows.

At that location under the porch the extra height does no good and diminishes the view. I would definitely move them back down.

I was wondering what you ended up doing to solve your problem. We are running into the same issue. I know we want our exterior doors to be 6'8" with a 1'4" transom (8' total) and we have some interior framed openings with a 6'8" opening and a 1'4" transom (8' total). But I'm trying to figure out what height interior doors to have. I could keep all of the openings the same with a 6'8" door or all of the trim work the same height with an 8' door. Any advice or photos of what you did would be greatly appreciated!

Hi -

If I were you I'd go with 6'8" interior doors with 1'4" transoms. We didn't end up changing anything and thankfully we only have one interior door where you really notice a difference. Our situation was somewhat different than yours because we have interior transoms throughout our house that don't have doors beneath them. In hindsight, I wish we would've found a way to make all the trim heights match throughout the house (windows, doors, transoms all match like my original picture). We would have needed to have an architect/designer who understood our vision, however. By the time we were in the framing stage with windows ordered, it was too late to throw a bunch of time/money at the problem. In the future we might look into a solution again, but we're going to live with what we have for a couple of years to see if it bothers us.

Here is a picture of our oddball door (to the right).

Since we have so many interior transoms, our biggest fear was not having enough glass so that the openings looked squatty. It basically paralyzed us into not doing anything.

Good luck - I know how hard of a decision this has to be for you.