Further Customizing A Home’s Porch To A Sunroom

Years back our company's founder, Keith Smith, was honored to handle a new home build for the Meacham family. Completed in 2021, the 1,518 square foot home featured 3 bedrooms and 3 baths. 

Another stand-out feature was a screened in porch off the back side of the house. It exited a second floor room, and included a stairway down to ground level. The Meachams were very happy with the build.

The Next Chapter: A Sunroom Conversion

Two years later, they reached out to us again to make an adjustment. While that screened in porch was a great concept initially, the Meachams found themselves wanting something a bit more climate-controlled for entertaining their family. A sunroom, they thought, would be perfect.

By this point Chris Smith was leading the company, which made their choice to hire us again all the more meaningful. For their family, it felt right to have the same team that had originally built their home be the ones making this addition. In that sense, their family and our company were growing together.

Interestingly, converting the screened in porch to a sunroom wasn’t as simple as closing in the walls.

Because the porch was suspended at the second floor level, it was relying on the screened walls to allow airflow to pass through the structure. (That pass-through prevented wind from putting stress on the structure.) Once those screened walls were replaced with solid, insulated ones, heavy wind might have created an issue.

The original beams were built to support the weight of the porch, but weren’t as resistant to lateral movement. Our solution was to reinforce the beams underneath the room’s flooring. Adding steel bracing to each joint significantly improved the structure, and made for a comfortable new space for the Meachams to entertain, to read books, or simply relax. All the benefits of natural light and a glimpse into the yard all seasons, yet now with climate control, too.

To make this new space feel like it’d always been part of the home, we went a step further and ensured the home’s flooring right up to the doorway was a smooth transition into the sunroom’s new tiled floor. 

Originally, the porch had a step-down design coming from the doorway into the home. That kind of step is common for exits from the home to mitigate water damage from heavy rains — a lot of front doors involve a step down onto the porch, for instance. But that’s a subtle thing that signals “outside thing.”

During this conversion process, we raised the floor to sit perfectly level with the rest of the flooring. As you can see in our linked Reel, it looks beautiful and now signals that this sunroom is a part of the home’s interior. It’s like it had always been there, and is one of the Meachams’ favorite touches from this project.

Our experiences building custom homes over the years rather naturally led to our recent project, which we are calling Rolling Meadows. The concept is to build a unique home on a beautiful meadow, where the property gets its namesake.

Check out our project page to see how that develops!

And if you’d like to explore a room addition or conversion like we’ve shared here, check out our Pricing Calculator for a free ballpark estimate!