Vinyl sunrooms in Riverside CA - a dry, comfortable room planned for how you'll use it

Most people who call us already have a patio or deck they hardly use. The biggest choice is how much of it you want closed in, heated and cooled, because that moves the price more than anything else. The room's size, whether it needs its own foundation, the roof and the windows come after that. The schedule mostly turns on the size, whether a permit is involved and whether an electrician or a heating and cooling trade has to fit in. If you're mostly after screens and shade, patio enclosures may be closer to what you need. Either way, the written estimate I send after my visit puts your own room on paper.

I start with what the room will sit on, because a slab or deck that wasn't built to carry walls is the first thing that lets a room settle and leak. Next we decide how much you want to close in, heat and cool. Insulated windows, walls, floors and roof are much easier to put in while the room is going up, and adding them later can often cost more. Then I show you upright windows next to sloped glass. Upright ones are simpler to seal and insulate, and the general design advice is that sloped glass is more prone to leaks, fogging and breakage, so you can decide whether that look is worth it to you. Once the plan is set, our crew sets the base and seals the floor track and the joint where the room meets your house. Then we frame and glaze the walls, put on the roof and clean up before we leave.

You don't need a patio to start with. If you'd rather add a room off the back of the house where nothing's built yet, that's one of our sunroom additions. If you already know you want the room heated and cooled all year, our page on four season sunrooms goes deeper into the comfort side.

Whether your sunroom needs a permit, and which forms it takes, depends on what we're building. Riverside Building & Safety is the city office that processes building permit applications, and its permit counter staff answer questions about the forms. On some projects, the city's Planning Division also reviews the plans against the building and zoning codes. The state's Energy Code sets efficiency requirements for additions and alterations, which is one more reason to settle your insulation level before the plans go in. When a permit is needed, we find out which office covers your address, file the paperwork and meet the inspector on site. I'll tell you what we know and what's still up to the city.

Most of the back yards I look at here already have a concrete patio, often with an older cover over it. A slab poured for patio chairs wasn't always poured to carry walls and a roof, so I check its edges and how it drains before we decide whether the room sits on it or needs new footings. We find the same kind of patios on jobs in Moreno Valley and Corona.