It’s always the right season to think about home improvement projects, and there are some projects that are worth considering more than others. A simple decorating project will be quick and cheap, but still leaves the essence of your home the same, and you’ll quickly be left wanting more. A full home extension is extremely time intensive, as well as requiring a huge budget, so you’ll need to wait and save to realize the changes you’re dreaming about. However, a sunroom is the perfect blend of cost-effective improvement with a project that can be completed in a matter of weeks in the right circumstances.
How Does A Sunroom Work?
A sunroom easily expands the livable footprint of your home by several hundred square feet almost instantly. It’s a solid construction unlike a patio cover, and gives you full year protection with full walls unlike a screened in porch. Sunrooms typically adjoin the back or side of your home, and while you can build them on any piece of flat land, you’ll save money by building it on top of an existing deck or patio to save money on the foundations.
The key feature of any sunroom design is the large volume of windows in the room. The big windows can preserve your mountain views and look out over your gardens, giving you a front row seat to the changing seasons. These windows also allow the sunroom to bring in and trap natural heat from the sunlight, keeping your sunroom at a comfortable temperature well into the evening months. The solid walls allow you to heat and cool the room at your leisure meaning that you can use your new space all year round.
Finding The Right Sunroom Contractor
However, as with all home improvement work, the quality of your finished sunroom will heavily depend on the quality of the sunroom builder that you choose to use. While the field of sunroom contractors is reasonably short in Calgary, you’ll want to take some of these points into consideration when you’re looking for the right sunroom contractor for your home:
- Local knowledge – Calgary has a lot of unique statuses in Canada. Most noticeably in terms of weather, it’s the sunniest city in the nation, as well as the windiest. When it comes to finding the right sunroom contractor for your project, you’ll want to sign up with a company who is based in Calgary so you know they understand the climate. This local knowledge will help them build you a sunroom that can utilize the long sunny days while also being strong enough to withstand the seemingly perpetual wind and the heavy snowfalls in winter.
- Proven experience – you also want to find a sunroom contracting business who can bring decades of experience to the table. While you might find that newer companies will offer cheaper prices as a way of building up their work portfolio, you should be asking about how many years in the field their contracting team has as a way of gauging whether you’ll get a great project as opposed to an average one.
- Evidence of prior work – finally, any reputable sunroom contractor should be able to provide you with plenty of locally completed projects coupled with satisfied customer reviews. While pictures on a website or in a glossy brochure help to illustrate some of their prior work, you’ll always get more of a feel for the work that they do if you ask to go and look at various properties that they’ve worked on.
Finding the right contractor in Calgary has become significantly easier in recent times with the advent of online advertising and review sites. Be sure to do your homework on each of the sunroom contractors you’re interested in, and make sure to pay careful attention to customer reviews, as these will give you the best indicator of how reliable a sunroom business is.
Unusual Sunroom Ideas
Working with an expert sunroom contractor also gives you someone to bounce different sunroom ideas around with. For most people, they choose to use their sunroom as a formal (meaning adults only!) living room or a brand new dining space with expansive views of your gardens or outdoor areas. However, its not uncommon to see sunrooms being used for indoor plant growing, workout rooms or even bedrooms and you can talk to your sunroom contractor about these and any other unusual sunroom ideas you have and they will be able to tweak the design and materials to best make the custom use room work for your needs:
- A plant room – the current trend of owning and keeping exotic and tropical plants shows no sign of slowing down, so if you’ve got lots of green babies that you’re struggling to keep alive, then a sunroom plant room could be the answer to your dream. In this design, your sunroom expert will work with you to maximize the amount of sunlight coming into the room, as well as finding ways to trap and build heat naturally without the need for forced air.
- A guest room – sometimes your sunroom can double as two spaces, and visitors to your home will never feel more welcome or have a better night’s sleep than when they get to relax in the sunroom at night. For this room setup, your sunroom builder will focus on how to make it dark at night, as well as planning the room size so that your guest bed will fit with further room to move around.
- A home office – Everyone wants an office with a window, how about all windows! As some the world returns to in person work, the need for remote or hybrid working still exists at many companies and in many industries. If this is an option for you, your sunroom will make an excellent secluded home office as you can close the doors and leave the office at the end of the day, everyone likes short work commutes. Your sunroom contractor will work with you to make sure there’s enough power outlets and wall space for whiteboards and motivational pictures.
- A Workout Room – With the expansive views and ability to either heat or cool the area with large opening windows a sunroom can be one of the best areas to keep your treadmill, exercise bike or yoga matts. With everything at the ready and the views inviting you into the room it makes that work-out a little less work, and a lot more enjoyable.
No matter what unusual (or usual!) idea you have for your sunroom, it will always be a good idea to share your thought process with your sunroom contracting experts. For example, if they know that you’re planning a workout room, they’ll pay more attention to air flow and creating usable floor space, while a home office will need more electrical outlets, as well as some solid wall space for your whiteboard and motivational posters.
