6 Sunroom Ideas For Your Home

 

Sunrooms are perfect additions to homes that are starved of sunlight. Less expensive than conventional additions, these built-ons offer more window space than wall space to bring in as much light as possible to one end of your home. See six basic sunroom ideas for your home.

Pre-Fabricated Sunroom

A pre-fabricated sunroom kit has been previously designed and built in a factory. Companies that design and build pre-fabricated sunrooms create a number of styles, shapes, and sizes so that homeowners can find one that best matches their own homes.

Pre-fabricated sunrooms are made of steel, aluminum, tempered glass, and foam insulation.

From the inside, pre-fabricated sunrooms retain not just an exterior wall but the look of that wall. The home’s exterior siding usually stays in place and doors that lead into the house are retained. From the outside, these sunrooms look very much like add-ons. These sunrooms usually have metal roofing. Since glass covers nearly every vertical area, it is not possible to continue the home’s siding onto the sunroom.

Sunroom Bumpout Addition

A house bumpout is a modest expansion of a room but it is not a room itself. And a bumpout falls well short of being a full addition: a multi-room, multi-function structure that is very expensive but which adds major resale value to your home.

Combining the idea of a bumpout with a sunroom gives you a bumpout hybrid that is heavily focused on sunlight and relaxation. This hybrid usually does not contain sleeping quarters, a kitchen, or a bathroom.

The walls are always substantial 16- or 24-inch on-center wood-framed, insulated walls. The sunroom aspect is that these walls are populated with far more windows than might be found in an ordinary sitting room.

From the exterior, these custom-built hybrid sunroom-bumpouts blend in well with the rest of the house. Siding, paint, roofing, and window styles all match. The only clues that this might be a sunroom are that it has an unusually large number of windows and that it extends farther into the property than the rest of the home.

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Sunroom Conservatory

A conservatory is a large structure with plenty of windows for growing and maintaining plants. A conservatory approaches greenhouse status since all walls and even the roof are made of glass.

The conservatory’s floor, too, is hardscaped in porcelain or ceramic tile, natural stone, or concrete for easy cleanup after watering.

When there is furniture, it is usually outdoor furniture made of resin, coated wood, or metal since the humidity levels would ruin fabric-covered furniture. Usually, though, furniture is kept to a minimum.

Back Porch Sunroom

True to the name, a back porch sunroom is located on and in the area of a former back porch. The main feature that distinguishes this type of sunroom from others is its location.

This sunroom still retains most of the back porch’s building elements. The flooring, roof, ceiling, and walls are the same. The only difference is that the open or screened windows have been replaced with glass windows.

Since porches tend to receive the worst damage that the elements deliver, they aren’t always build-ready. Unless the porch is relatively new and in good shape, it may not be able to be converted into a sunroom.