A sunroom is a room built around daylight, with more of its walls given to windows than an ordinary room. We build ours as four-season rooms: heated and cooled, joined to the house as an addition, and meant for use on a cold morning as well as a warm evening.
The two names describe one product. "Sunroom" says what the room is for, and "four-season room" says when you can use it. It suits a household that lives on the porch from spring to fall and wants that view the rest of the year, or a house with a sunny side that no room makes use of.
A three-season room is a different product: it closes a porch in with window panels for spring-through-fall use, without heating and cooling.
What goes into a four-season room
- Heating and cooling: installed by licensed trades under their own permits, so the room is meant for every season
- Footings: inspected by the county before the concrete is poured, with the concrete from Capitol Concrete, our own supply company
- A roof tied into the house: the new roof joined to the old one and flashed where they meet
- A matched outside: siding, trim, windows and roofing picked to look like the rest of the house
- Wiring: run by a licensed electrician under a permit of its own
How we build a sunroom
A four-season room is one of the additions we build, so it goes up the way our home additions do, from the inspected footings to the flashing where the new roof meets the old. Before anything is built, you get a design and one firm written price; the engineering for the permit drawings comes after that, and then we file the county building permit and line up the inspections.
A four-season room is heated and cooled, and that is the line between it and a porch closed in with window panels.
Outside, the room gets siding, trim, windows and roofing that match the house. JK General Contractor builds it under its Virginia Class A license, No. 2705135143, and the same project manager handles your job from our first meeting until the walkthrough at the end.
Sunroom, three-season room or screened porch?
The three can look alike from the yard. What sets them apart is what fills the openings and whether the room is heated and cooled with the house.
| What differs | Screened porch | Three-season room | Sunroom (four-season room) |
|---|---|---|---|
| The openings | Fiberglass screens | Window panels in place of plain screens | Windows, in walls sided to match the house |
| Heated and cooled with the house | No | No | Yes |
| When it is used | The warm months | Spring through fall | Every season |
| Built as | A roofed porch on a deck or a ground-level floor | A porch closed in with window panels | An addition on inspected footings |
If the room is for evenings from spring through fall, a three-season room or a screened porch is the one to look at. If you want to read in it on a cold February morning, it has to be a four-season room.
Planning a sunroom?
Tell us how you picture using the room, and we will come out to look at where it would go.
Where We Build Sunrooms
A four-season room is built as an addition, so we draw it, file its building permit with the county your house is in and line up the inspections. Where a community review board must approve it first, we prepare the samples, product sheets and drawings it asks for.
How much does a sunroom addition cost?
Every sunroom is priced on its own, in writing, after we have seen the house, and you get one firm number rather than a range. These are the things that move it:
- Size: the floor area, and the height of the walls and the ceiling
- Windows: how many, how large and what kind
- Heating and cooling: whether the house's system can serve the room or it needs equipment of its own
- What it stands on: the footings, and what the slope of the yard asks for under the floor
- The roof tie-in: how the new roof meets the old one
- Matching: the siding, trim and roofing that match the house
- Inside: the lighting, outlets, flooring and trim
- What comes out first: an old deck or porch where the room will go
- Approvals: the county permit and the review board's requirements
Which side of the house should a sunroom go on?
The side you will use it from, with the sun in mind. A room on the south side gets sun through most of the day, a west-facing room takes the hot afternoon sun, and an east-facing room gets the morning light.
Does a sunroom in South Riding need HOA approval?
Yes. South Riding has an architectural review board, and a sunroom changes the outside of the house, so the board has to approve it, separately from the county's building permit. Much of Ashburn has review boards too. Plan for the board's timing: its approval can take longer than the county's permit.
South Riding sits in the same 20152 ZIP code as our shop on Gum Spring Road in Chantilly, and its homes are in Loudoun County, as are Leesburg and Ashburn.
Is a sunroom the right project for your house?
A sunroom adds a bright room for sitting, eating or working. If what the house needs is a bedroom, a room addition or basement finishing with an egress window fits better; if it is a bigger kitchen or a newer bath, look at kitchen remodeling or bathroom remodeling. Sunrooms sit with the rest of our inside work under home remodeling.
