I could spray foam into the gaps above the brick and below the floor boards to seal it up Perfect. You're air sealing, not insulating. Never put fibrous insulation behind those solid brick walls or in the rim joist area of any house. It will get wet, promote mould growth and not insulate or air seal. Here is a link that might be useful: Insulating Old Brick Buildings This post was edited by worthy on Sun, Mar 3, 13 at 9:54

Just make a ledge just below the bottom of the windows about 8" below and the width should be around 15-18" to accommodate up to a 75" HDTV. The ledge would run the entire length of the windows. You can built-in shelves for DVDs and other stuff you would be using with your TV too or just make it look like a bookcase. The height of the ledger would depend on how high your bed is in relation to the viewing position of the TV.

I would imagine that just putting a nook for a shower size only would not do too much to help the overall bathroom layout. Maybe the entire bath needs bumped out, not just the shower. Start with a plan of the bath/bedroom/closets/budget/ROI and make decisions that way. Construction-wise that looks to be a stand-a-lone wall to hide an outdoor shower and is not connected to the house wall, maybe even sitting on top of the slab (no footing/thickened). So it might require more than just tacking on a shed roof on top, like starting from scratch.

Would sliding doors or picture windows be significantly less expensive than trapezoid windows? It would be nice to potentially reuse the window on the left on the south-facing side near the dining table. The "window" on the bottom right is actually a door that is swollen shut and may need to be replaced anyway with either a door or window). The windows/doors would be facing a low traffic residential street, so for privacy reasons, emphasizing the vaulted ceiling, and for providing light for raised plants (they need to be kept away from my cats), I'm leaning towards the upper windows if they are the same price. Though maybe the privacy doesn't matter as much because there are already lower windows? I want to paint the currently blue walls white and whitewash the fireplace to lighten it, but would be interested in tongue and groove ceilings down the line if we're able to lighten the room enough that they wouldn't make it even darker. I don't have a floor plan, but here are some more pictures of the house and space (these are from two different listings of the same house). I think the light will be fine in the winter when we lose the leaves, but the house is heavily shaded due to all the trees and all the other rooms and the backyard are even darker so lighting up the main living space feels very important. I'm imagining skylights might be difficult to clean/ maintain unless we trim the trees back pretty severely.