Sunroom Extension
When we bought this house there was an unused concrete deck that was gingerly sitting outside a door. This deck’s base was 4 inches of solid concrete, and it was supported by 8 inch concrete block walls which housed a garage. We looked at it when we first toured the house and said “that’s just unused space, we can extend it if the house is a little small”. Sure enough the living space was a tad too small.
Overtime this idea grew and she wanted it to have a wood stove too. 🔨
As this was a larger project, I got some help. I had a structural engineer come out to tell me if the garage could bear the weight of an extension on top of it, he confirmed it could carry probably up to about 2 stories. There were indeed 18 inch footers in the ground; light footers, but they were deep enough and no structural error seemed to be present.
After that we bided some time to save some money. We hired contractors at Prince Builders LLC to initiate our house building endeavor. The deal we worked out was they would be responsible for getting a subfloor, walls, windows, the roof, exterior wall leading into the sunroom knocked out, and exterior of the extension waterproofed. I would be doing the finishing: drywall, trim, electric, insulation, siding, wood stove, and hearth.
The contractors and I worked at the same time on a few things; I took a week off while they were working to attempt and get a lot of the nitty gritty stuff done.
Before long walls were up and roof was done, whole project took about 1 month until it was livable, and 3 months total to get it into the shape that it is in the pictures - had a few setbacks.
Worst part of this extension is now that i have all the extra light i can see the dog hair all the time 💀. Worried a little bit about AC too, but haven’t had a hot enough week to know if its bad or not.
This project was started in October, and ended in January
TLDR Before/After Shots
Inside
Outside
Google Drive of Photos
Located here 🏚️
Difficulty List
Usually I get asked about what the hardest part was, here is a table of what i thought was difficult and what wasnt
| Item | Difficulty | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Siding | Easy | Level it all out in the beginning, lots of cuts but not bad. Don’t fall off the ladder |
| Flooring | Easy | Do it at the right time and you’ll have no problems, before trim after walls after paint |
| Trim | Medium | This room was annoying because of the amount of trim i had to do, each piece of wood around the window was custom planed and made by me |
| Hearth | Hard | Lots of measuring, lots of leveling, lots of time, while applying concrete easy to mess up |
| Chimney | Hard | Even more measuring than hearth cause you’re now in 3 dimensions, also had to triple check everything to prevent fires |
| Insulation | Easy | Takes forever, but easy and itchy, just had to remember baffles. |
| Electrical | Easy | Always my favorite |
| Wood Stove | Medium | Heavy as heck, had to be clever to avoid hurting my brand new sunroom |
| Drywall | Hard | I ended up hanging all the drywall myself, hired someone to finish it, it was too time consuming and I found out its cheap |
For the wood stove, to get it over the stoop coming in i actually built like a makeshift ramp out of two-by fours. By some miracle nothing got injured. The thing weighs over 400lbs
Injury
There are photos in the drive about when I cut off the tip of my finger. Was just me being an idiot. I saw online people cutting these vinyl planks with their utility knives and thought “hey that looks easy” It wasn’t, it slipped while i was cutting with a lot of force.
More After Photos
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