Sunroom contractor in Mentone, CA - rooms planned around your septic system

Most of Mentone runs on septic tanks and leach fields instead of a sewer line, though your own lot may be different, and that matters because the tank or the leach lines are often right off the back of the house where the room wants to go. Footings dug through a leach line or a slab poured over a tank lid are repairs you'd be paying for long after the room is done. So before I sketch a footprint, I ask what you know about your system, look for the tank lid and cleanouts, and we lay the room out to stay off it, even if that means shifting it a few feet or changing its shape.

The other thing I watch for here is water. Plenty of back patios were poured flat or even tipped toward the house, and once you put walls on a slab like that, rain that used to run off ends up inside the tracks. We set the base so water moves away from the house, seal the bottom track, and tie the roof in where the flashing can do its job.

Mentone isn't its own city, so the building permit for a sunroom comes from San Bernardino County's Building and Safety office, whose permit list covers additions and alterations, patio covers and new structures over 120 square feet. We take care of that permit on our jobs and the contract says so in writing, and your start date waits on the county signing off, so the schedule turns on that review and on how much of the base we have to build new. The county doesn't issue a business license for contractors working in its unincorporated areas, so the license to check is the state one, which you can look up with the Contractors State License Board. We're licensed and fully insured. Price moves mostly on the size of the room and whether your slab or deck can carry it, and the written estimate lists what's in it and what isn't.

We're a sunroom contractor based in Redlands, CA, and Mentone is close enough that I can stop by a job here on short notice. When a house sits near Redlands East Valley High School, we set lumber and glass deliveries for the middle of the day so the trucks aren't caught in drop-off and pickup traffic. The same planning carries over to the jobs we do in Yucaipa and Calimesa.

Mentone is an unincorporated community that sits between Redlands and the San Bernardino National Forest, along the route where the Santa Ana River Trail is proposed to run. Folks here know it by places like the Mentone Senior Center and Library and the high school, more than by any city line.

On our jobs we see a mix of older single-story houses with real back yards and newer houses on tighter lots, much like what we work on in Highland. Either kind usually has a patio slab or a deck off the back already, and somebody who wants a room they can use most of the year. The job almost always comes down to whether that base, and the ground under it, can carry a room, and that's where most of my planning goes.