Vinyl sunrooms in Redlands CA - a room planned around how you'll really use it

Most people who call us have a patio or a stretch of back wall they barely use, and they want a real room there. The price moves with the size of the room, whether it's a three-season or four-season room, how much insulation and glass it needs, and whether your slab or deck can carry it or needs new footings. The schedule mostly turns on the permit and on what I find when I look at the base and the house wall, and your estimate puts your own figure in writing. If you already have a covered slab out back, a patio-to-sunroom conversion may be the place to start.

I start by measuring, looking at the slab or deck, and checking the house wall, because a room is only as good as what holds it up. Then we lay the room options out side by side, so you can see what you get for the money, and we keep the plan to what you'll really use. Before anything is ordered, I work out how the new roof ties into the house, since one sunroom maker's installer training says the fascia board, the trim board along your roof edge, is rarely able to carry the added load of an attached roof. Our crew then sets the base, puts up the walls, ties in and seals the roof, and seals the tracks before we clean up and hand the room over.

Some rooms grow past a simple enclosure. If you want to heat and cool the room and use it every month, we build it as one of our four season sunrooms, and a larger room that opens into the house on its own foundation runs more like one of our sunroom additions.

In Redlands, the city's Building division issues permits for home additions and for patio and deck work, but its list names additions, patios and decks, not sunrooms, so whether your room needs a permit is a question we put to the city before we build. We take care of the permits the building office asks for on our jobs, whether that office is the city or the county, and the contract says in writing that we're handling them. The state's energy standards also apply to additions on an existing house, and what they ask of the walls, roof, windows and doors depends on the climate zone your house sits in, so we plan the glass and insulation with that in mind. The state fire marshal also has a fire hazard map where you can enter your address and see where your property falls.

We're based in Redlands and work in many of the cities around it in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. On jobs in Yucaipa and Loma Linda, we see the same older back slabs and long, hot afternoons, so I check the slab and which wall takes the afternoon sun before I draw anything.