Hello, I’m looking at building a home in the next couple of years and we are looking at building colonial style two story home with a 12/12 roof pitch with an attached garage. Hopefully this will be our retirement home and we still have children in the early grades so we will be there for at least 3 decades. My question is in regards to using attic space as a games room / family room: would we be better off having a finished attic on the main house with some dormer windows or have a finished attic on the garage with some dormer windows and the ability to get to it from the second story of the home. I’m not sure which would be better from an economics / energy efficiency perspective. The ground we will be building on is wet so while there will be a basement (frost line is so deep in Canada you may as well have one) it will remain unfinished and provide room for a workshop and storage. We will be located in New Brunswick Canada, due East of the Maine border. Thanks for reading and if I should post this somewhere else please let me know.

Greg