The house we are trying to buy has dormers.
/d-or-mer/: A dormer is a structural element of a building that protrudes from the plane of a sloping roof surface. Dormers are used, either in original construction or as later additions, to create usable space in the roof of a building by adding headroom and usually also by enabling addition of windows
You will notice how horrible I am at photo credits. Most of them came from images in google when searching for dormers. That is that case for this one:
This dormer add's a significant amount of light. And while the head space isn't all that useful, it adds a fair amount of that as well.
The above image is from Cote de Texas, this deep dormer is lovely. Doesn't it look so large compared to that chair? I wonder if that chair is full sized. Again, the additional head space seems like it wouldn't be all that functional here, but that architecturally the depth is lovely, and the window is sublime.
This picture came from google photos. I like this photo for a couple reason. Most obviously, because the windows are divine. I like to see dormers with a brick house (because ours is brick) and I like to see the roofing shingles used as siding on the sides of the dormers. I don't think I would do this, because we have asphalt and not slate, but this is motivation to consider slate in the future!
These look a lot like the ones above, but with asphalt shingles they opted to use siding instead of shingles. The columns give it a cape cod feel.
This house has the slate roofing and dormer siding combo as well.
If you look closely, you can see they used the house siding on the dormers, and even painted it green to match. 
I think this came from Holly at Things that Inspire. The casing windows are lovely, and I really like the set of three. I only have one on the front of the house. I also like the pitched roof. The roof on our house is flat like the one below.
Holly again. Holly over at Things that inspire has posted this house quite a bit, she loves it! Can you blame her, it's perfect- the green around the windows is lovely.
This picture cam from Holly, and I love it because the limestone windows on the smaller dormers look great with the added details on the pitched roof.
This is one of my favorite Southern Accents homes. I like the siding, probably cement board, contrasting with the brick. They look like they are painted blue, or a different, brighter shade than the green on the fence.
This steep pitch of the dormer allows for most of the dormer to be asphalt and very little siding. I like it-
Look at these wee little dormers on this home. We are contemplating pitching the roof of our dormers. This is a good example of that they would look like if we left them white.
Those might look something like these close up.
The slope of this roof moves all the way down to the original roof line. I don't like it as much, but it does widen the opening inside the home.
Somewhat common, especially out in the west, is the arched dormer. Obviously there are some much prettier than this. Like this one:
There are so many choices in a home. Even something as simple as dormers require research and thought! I don't know how I'll ever get through this. We have to repair the roof around the dormers so we'd like to pitch the roof and reside them at the same time. What do you think would look good on our house?
