Screen room installation in Rancho Santa Margarita CA - a patio room without the bugs

Most people who call me have a patio they love in the morning and give up on by dusk, and they want it back without taking on a full remodel. What moves the price is mostly the size, the wall style you pick, how the roof ties into the house and what's there now, whether that's a slab, a deck or an old cover, while the schedule usually turns more on city and association approvals than on the build itself. If you're torn between screen and glass, our three season sunrooms page is worth a read too, and the estimate gives you the plan and your price in writing.

I start by looking at what you have now and asking how you'll use the room, because that decides the walls. Then we choose between full screen walls, which give you the widest view, and a solid knee wall with insulated panels, which makes a glass upgrade easier down the road, so that call gets made before anything is built. Before we settle the roof, I look at how your house is built, since the roof can attach to the house wall or to the fascia, the board that runs along your roof edge, and the right choice is whichever one anchors it to the house's structural parts. Once the design is set and approved, our crew frames the walls, sets the roof, stretches the screen and cleans up after itself.

Plenty of people start with screen and want more later, and that's where the knee wall pays off. If you'd rather go straight to glass, a patio-to-sunroom conversion turns your slab into a real room, and if your outdoor space is a raised deck, a deck-to-sunroom conversion is the closer fit.

A screen room here usually moves through the city, your association and a look at the fire map before it gets built. The City of Rancho Santa Margarita requires a building permit for a patio cover, and its permit list names additions, residential accessory structures and electrical work but not screen rooms, so the list alone doesn't settle your job. We ask the city's building office what it needs before plans go in, and when a permit applies we prepare the paperwork and pull it as your contractor. If you're in SAMLARC, changes at the front of the house, or anything in the back or side yard that rises above the fence line, need approval from SAMLARC, and from a sub-association if you have one, through the SAMLARC Resident Portal, and we help put together what that review asks for. A proposed fire hazard map placed about 70% of the city in very high, high or moderate fire hazard zones, and properties on those maps fall under building standards for new construction where homes meet wildland, plus defensible space rules, so look up your own address on the city's fire hazard map page and bring what you find to the estimate.

Most of what we screen in around here is a concrete patio under an older cover, or a tired screen room someone wants redone, and a lot of those homes sit in associations, so we plan the review into the schedule from the start. We see the same setups on jobs in Mission Viejo and Ladera Ranch, and we work across the other cities around Orange County too.