warming up to our sunroom

Welcome to those coming from Better After! If you'd just like to skip to more "after" pictures of our sunroom, please click here. And thanks for stopping by!

From the moment we moved in, the sunroom was one of our favorite rooms of the house, because it faces south and has a lovely view of our backyard and the park behind our house.

But it certainly didn't look like this when we bought the house. The original three-season porch needed a complete overhaul: the posts supporting the roof were rotting at the bottom, the drop ceiling was falling in, the plug-in ceiling fan hung dangerously low and wobbled alarmingly, and the exposed brick wall and concrete floor were filthy. Ants and water made their way freely beneath the aluminum framework, and the cracked window panes were held in place by finicky metal clips and duct tape. Nevertheless, the view could not be beat, so I hung gauzy curtains to hide the rotting posts and filled the room with plants - it makes a great greenhouse in the winter. We put a cheap wooden table and chairs out there and ate most of our meals imagining what the room would look like when we remodeled it.
I don't have very many "before" pictures, but these should give you an idea:

When we decided to remodel, the burden was on me to find a good contractor, determine a design, and stay within budget (around $10K). H had veto power, but that was the extent of his involvement. The process went something like this:

1. Call some "sunroom" contractors. I interviewed six. All of them acted like know-it-alls, glossed over the details of the plans they were suggesting, and if they had called me "sweetheart" or "little lady" I wouldn't have been surprised. 
• Get frustrated. Wait several months before starting from scratch.
2. Our neighbor suggested a contractor that one of her colleagues knew from church. 
• We hired this guy (Mike) to draw up an architectural plan for the renovation. We began running into problems almost immediately, when he would not return e-mails and phone calls for days at a time and responded brusquely to my requests for clarification on his estimate.
• I was not willing to start from scratch again, so we forged ahead. After receiving his draft plan for the remodel, I met with him to make changes and give feedback, only to discover that he did not appreciate my input, and, in fact, any suggestions on my part made him defensive and angry. At this point the communications between us became noticeably tense.
• To make a long story short, Mike (whom we nicknamed "Mike Anus," since that rhymes with his actual name) was simultaneously doing a driveway patching and sealing job for us and our neighbors (we share a driveway). One afternoon, as I weeded out front, Mike, who was working on the driveway, without a word threw all his equipment into his truck and peeled out of the driveway (running over wet tar on his way out). After not hearing any explanation from him for several hours, we ended both our contracts (sunroom and driveway) with him, despite the fact that (a) the sunroom plans were incomplete, and we had already paid him in full and (b) the driveway work was incomplete, and our neighbors had paid half the cost upfront.

*siiiiigggghhhhhhhh*

3. Third time's the charm! This time I researched contractors on the NARI website and found two "design-build" contractors. Both seemed much more interested to work with me on designing the room, and both appeared willing to explain things to me and receive feedback. Contractor A had a more established business, but specialized in higher-budget projects. Contractor B had been a math teacher before deciding to go into contracting on his own. He was mainly self-taught.
• I liked the professionalism of Contractor A, although he was not as personable as Contractor B. But when he said that he could not meet our budget, I did not hesitate to give Contractor B a call and say we wanted to work with him.
• With his background in education, Contractor B (John) was calm, patient, and willing to explain things. Lesson: if you are a detail-oriented control freak like me, make sure that your contractor is okay with that. John understood my desire to be involved in every step of the process; after all, we were about to spend thousands of dollars on our home, and we wanted to make sure the result met our expectations. 

In the matter of a few weeks, John and I hashed out the details:

• I wanted the windows to be as close to floor-to-ceiling as possible, to maximize the view. We planned a minimum 18" knee wall as required by code. Floor-level windows were not an option, since they require tempered glass and are therefore more expensive. (The first contractors I had interviewed had all proposed a 3' knee wall and would not entertain other options.)
• John waited for me to visit the window manufacturer on my own and speak to the salesmen there to get first-hand knowledge of the different window choices. 
• Double-hung were out, since they would have a horizontal bar right in our sightlines. 
• Awning windows were my first choice (so that we could open them even when it was raining), but they don't make vinyl awning windows as tall as I wanted them to be. 
• Sliders were my second choice, but they also don't make vinyl sliders as tall as we needed.
• That left casement windows, which I like aesthetically, but require annoying cranking to open and close.
• John even accompanied me on a little field trip to a neighbor's house down the street, where they had removed the drop ceiling entirely to create a vaulted, open space. He cheerfully reworked our estimate to include vaulting the ceiling and installing two trapezoidal windows. This took us way over budget (to around $15K), but the final result was so worth it.

Finally, in late August, work began. And so, in one day, our grungy old sunroom was demo'ed and the framing for the new windows was put up, and I came home after a long day at work to see this:

 I was both thrilled and alarmed. Take a closer look at the underside of the roof:

When John and his assistant (comically also named John) arrived the next morning, I was up on their ladder (in my work clothes, in heels) taking a closer look at this rotted mess. Were they taken aback? Did they question me indignantly? No! Assistant-John joked and asked if I was going to be helping them that day, and then explained that yes, that was water damaged wood, but he reassured me that it was old and non-structural, and the new plywood lying on top was sound and showed no signs of rot. (I think Otto deserves the blame for neglecting this room, while Norma gets the credit for having the roof replaced in 1998.)

So with that worry assuaged, it was time to install the windows. At the end of Day 2, here's what I saw:

At this point it was starting to look like a finished room! But the real transformation happened when those trapezoidal windows were installed on Day 3:

Cue the choirs of angels singing when I saw that afternoon sun pouring in. Compare that with this:

That's a shot of the other side of the room before they put the upper window in. See how closed-off the room feels, even with the vaulted ceiling? The airiness we gained was totally worth the added cost of those windows.

And then - it was done! All the windows were in, the drywall was up, and John & John left. To cut costs (since we were so far over budget) I was going to do all the painting in the room. As Assistant-John was leaving, he looked at the rough brick-and-block that had been above the ceiling and said, "you've got a lot of work ahead of you." Here's what it looked like:

The brick was painted white up to where the old ceiling was, but then unpainted above that. Over the next few weeks, I spent a lot of time up on the ladder so I could:

1. scrape off the old caulk along line where painted brick met unpainted brick
2. use a brush and a vacuum to clean out any crumbling mortar
3. fill large gaps in the mortar with expanding foam and smaller gaps with spackle 
    PS, there were a lot of gaps.
4. lightly sand the spackled areas, then use a sponge and bucket to wash the dust and grime off the whole wall. Allow several days to dry.
5. add additional caulk around the edge where the brick met the drywall. I don't know if I'm a perfectionist, or if John & John didn't caulk enough, but there were gaps in several places where there was no caulk at all, and in other places the caulk had settled up to 1/2" below the level of the drywall. It took several applications of caulk to make the seams relatively smooth.
6. prime. Brick and block are incredibly porous, so this was slow-going. The surface just soaked up the primer like a sponge. The silver lining was that just a little primer gave me a hint as to what the wall would look like when I was done:
   
7. paint. I painted two full coats on the whole wall. Even with the primer, the upper part of the wall sucked up the paint, so it took several passes to cover the remaining tinges of red and gray, but eventually the whole wall looked like this:
   

There were some small issues to tackle along the way, like the old caulking around the doors. Initially I tried to remove it all, but it was a painfully slow process, and I was left with a sizeable gap between the brick and the trim:

So I filled the gap with expanding foam,

used an old bread knife to cut away the foam that protruded from the gap,

and just ran a thick bead of caulk over the rough seam. It's not pretty, but the primer and several coats of paint helped even everything out. Let's call it "character."

(Side note: I was 4 months pregnant with Roxie as I did all this. After one day spent smoothing caulk with my fingers I remember reading all the toxic warnings on the tube and panicking just a little. H was also a little concerned when he would come home after a day of work to find me still painting away, oblivious to the paint fumes. Roxie, if you don't get into Harvard, I guess now you know why.)

After I finished the final coat of paint on the wall and the doorways, I moved on to painting all the trim and drywall in the room, and then, finally, the ceiling.

Until one day I found myself waiting for the final patches of ceiling paint to dry and I realized... that's it! I'm done! Now we just have to lay down the floors!

After much hemming and hawing and trying to decide what flooring to get, we settled on laminate floors, despite the fact that installing them in our un-climate-controlled sunroom would void the warranty. Since I didn't know if the temperature fluctuations were going to warp the floors after one winter, I chose a fairly cheap laminate. I tried to choose a color that could pass, at a distance, as an extension of the oak hardwood floors we have in the rest of the house. The goal was to make the sunroom feel less like an addition and more like an extension of the living space.
Initially my mother was going to help me install the floor. (My mom is an avid DIY-er herself... she has installed both a wood stove – including the chimney!! – and a whole-house fan by herself. She tackles projects I would never dream of trying on my own.)
My mom came over one afternoon in late spring to plan our the floor installation. After procrastinating for several hours, we came to the realization that (1) we probably could do it, but it was going to take us a while to figure out the tricky areas around the doorways, (2) we weren't really motivated to DIY and (3) a contractor could complete it professionally in one day, and it would be guaranteed to look great.
So I gave John a call, and explained that we were having a party in a month and it would be really nice to have our floors in so that we could show off the completed sunroom and would there be any way for him to squeeze us in? Three weeks later we had beautiful floors, a couple new sofas from West Elm (major splurge*), and an amazing sunroom to enjoy just as the summer was starting.

May 2011

May 2011

The white bistro table is also from West Elm (I think it retailed for $169), but I found it on Craigslist serendipitously and bought it for FIVE DOLLARS from a guy who was moving across the country and liquidating his furniture in a hurry. The chairs are IKEA.
So here's where we started:

And here's what the room looks like today:

Is it just me, or do you hear choirs of angels singing, too? It's amazing what money can achieve, but it can be more fun, in a challenging kind of way, to try to find solutions to problems without taking the demo-and-remodel route. If this room had not had the structural problems it did (rotting posts and falling-down ceiling), then we might have tried to make a series of smaller changes to spruce it up. But we're so happy with how it turned out, and we enjoy it so much throughout the year, that it was definitely worth the investment to us.
There are a few minor things to fix before I can declare the room 100% done:

The caulking will be easy, but the doors are going to be a huge pain, and I'm sure that the paint that's on them now contains lead, which is why I haven't done anything with them yet. But since the old paint is starting to flake off, I really have to get on this before Roxie starts eating the paint chips off the floor.
So, to recap:
What we've done so far:

• hired contractors to gut the room and remodel it

What's left to do:

• recaulk around windows
• strip and repaint doors

Questions for you:

1. Should we look into artwork/mirrors for the large blank white brick wall? At present, the only thing hanging on it is an old map of Rhode Island from my grandmother's house (see below). We kind of like it blank, since the real artwork is in the view out the windows. But maybe a mirror?
2. Should I unify all the plant pots by making them all the same color? The "pops of color" in this room were supposed to be yellow and green, but since we're working with what we have, the pots do not adhere to the color scheme.

And in the "keeping it real" category, one sofa was (and still is) covered with files from the cabinet that used to be next to the desk in the living room. Most of the files found a new home in two totes that live in a closet upstairs, but these folders didn't fit, so they're waiting for me to buy another tote.

And, if there were sound included with these pictures, you'd be hearing Roxie crying in every one, since the entire time I was taking photos she was clinging to my legs holding a bag of Ghirardelli chocolate chips, begging me to open them for her (I didn't even know she knew what chocolate chips were!)

Up next: the guest room

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* although they did give us 10% back in "design dollars," so we got two pillows and a nice floor lamp for "free" with our purchase. And later in the year they sent us $25 in "design dollars" with no minimum purchase, so we got two cereal mugs and a Christmas ornament, too. (go back)