All season rooms in Rancho Santa Margarita CA - a room you can use all year

Most people who call me have a patio, a deck or a tired screen room they hardly use, and before anything else we figure out which kind of room you actually need, because a room that's too hot to sit in or can't be warmed up later is a hard thing to fix. The price moves with the size of the room, what it sits on, the windows and insulation, and whether it gets its own heating and cooling, while the schedule mostly turns on settling the design and on what the city and any association want to review. I walk the space with you and put the plan and the price in writing, so you're working from your own number instead of a guess.

The first thing I settle with you is whether the room opens to the house or stays closed off with its own heating and cooling, because the industry's sunroom standard treats a heated or cooled room that's open to the house as habitable space, a real room of the house, and one closed off on its own system as non-habitable, and that choice shapes everything after it. Then we plan the windows and the insulation for the walls, floor and roof to match, before a single wall goes up, since all of that goes in much more easily during the build and can often cost more to add later. After that our crew preps the slab, deck or new foundation, frames the room, sets the insulation and the all weather windows, ties in the heating and cooling, and finishes the inside so it feels like part of your house.

If heating and cooling aren't on your list, our enclosed patio rooms close in the space without them, and if you'd like as much glass and light as possible, including overhead, take a look at our solarium installation work, since a solarium is fully enclosed, heated and cooled just like an all season room.

Whether an all season room needs a permit here isn't something the city's list settles on its own. The city's Building and Safety Division is where you ask, and its permit list names building additions and heating and air-conditioning systems without naming all season rooms, so we find out what it needs for your project before plans go in, and when a permit applies we prepare the paperwork and pull it as your contractor. The plans can also need a look from Public Works or Planning, or from outside agencies like the Orange County Fire Authority, and I'll tell you which of those your room is likely headed for. When the room counts as an addition under the state's building energy standards, the forms showing it meets them go in for approval too, and we prepare those with the rest.

Most of what we're asked to close in here is a slab patio or an older aluminum cover behind the house, often on a sloped lot or a tight side yard, so I look hard at what the room will sit on and how the roof ties into the house. We're based in Rancho Santa Margarita and see the same slab patios and older covers on jobs in Mission Viejo and Ladera Ranch.