Sunroom design in La Palma CA - a room planned around how you'll really use it

Most of our calls come from people with a patio, a deck or an old sunroom out back that doesn't get much use, and the real question is what kind of room would change that. The price moves mostly with size, whether the room needs a new foundation and whether it'll be heated and cooled with insulated glass and walls, so a bigger, fully closed room lands well above a screened one. The schedule turns mostly on how fast the design gets settled and how long the city takes to review it, since nothing gets built until the drawings are approved. If you're starting from a bare slab, a patio-to-sunroom conversion is where a lot of these jobs begin, and your estimate lays out the room type, the options and the price for your house.

I start by coming out to measure and to look closely at what the room will sit on and tie into, whether that's a patio slab, a deck or the wall and roofline of your house. If there's an existing slab, we check whether it's a post tension slab, the kind with steel cables pulled tight inside it, before anyone cuts it, because cutting one of those cables is dangerous and expensive to fix. Then we sit down and settle three things: how closed in the room will be, how it opens to the house and what goes in the walls and roof. Those choices set most of the price and they're hard to change once framing is up, so we draw up and price the room you picked, and the room on paper is the room we build.

Design usually leads straight into the build. If you're leaning toward a vinyl frame, we can price vinyl sunrooms next to other options while the plan is still on paper. When the design opens the room to your house and heats and cools it, the job usually becomes one of our sunroom additions, drawn and built as part of the house.

In La Palma, the city puts almost all improvement plans through plan check before it issues a permit, and some plans also need Fire or Health review on top of that, while the city's planning staff handle residential remodel and design review applications. If your job needs a permit, we take care of it, so we prepare the plans, file them with the city, book the inspections and let you know ahead of any visit where you need to be home. California's Energy Code also sets energy efficiency rules for additions to existing houses, which is one more reason glass and insulation get decided at the drawing stage and not halfway through the build.

We're based in La Palma and work in many of the cities around it, on both the Orange County and Los Angeles County sides. Most of what we design here sits on an existing back patio slab or replaces an older patio cover, and we see the same setups on jobs in Cypress and Buena Park.