For the homeowner looking to enjoy nature without becoming an all-you-can-eat buffet for mosquitoes, the screened porch has long been a viable solution. In recent years, though, it has faced increasingly stiff competition from the sunroom, as the latter has grown more and more practical.
A sunroom, of course, accomplishes much of what a screened porch accomplishes. It keeps the bugs out. It need not be avoided during inclement weather. And the owner doesn’t need to invest much time into keeping it free of dead leaves, grass clippings and animal leavings.
A sunroom also carries a unique set of advantages over its screened cousin, but it isn’t better in every possible category. Each of the two has its own pros and cons, so a homeowner making a decision about their outdoor space should examine their preferences closely.
What are the options?
A sunroom, sometimes called a hearth room, is entirely enclosed. It has finished walls and a great deal of window space, sometimes including skylights. It may be called a three-seasons room if its walls are not insulated, or a four-seasons room if it’s insulated and can be temperature-controlled all year.
Custom Home Works
A screened porch is more closely connected to outdoors, so it’s light on insulation, and may not have any at all. It has columns to support the roof, but the walls aren’t finished. It may not even have a proper floor built over the foundation.
Of late, remodeling consumers have been trending toward sunrooms, particularly the three-seasons variety, says Bill Maibach, owner of Custom Home Works. Homebuilder Fischer Homes offers both sunrooms and screened porches, though the latter are not available in all of the plans the company offers, and has seen similar preferences from customers.
“Many buyers opt for these spaces to enhance their indoor-outdoor living experience, evoking a warmer atmosphere even in the heart of the Midwest,” says Madison Durham, assistant marketing manager for Fischer.
Aesthetic and functional concerns
If the sunroom is an addition to an existing home and not a feature of a brand new one, it’s a little easier to make it look consistent with the rest of the home. Certainly, it’s possible to make a screened porch look like it’s been attached to the house all along, and a good contractor will make every effort to ensure that continuity, but an indoor space is always going to look like more of an extension of the home than an outdoor space.
“We try to blend it into the house as nicely as possible so it looks like a structure that’s always been there,” says Maibach.
If a sunroom is part of the plans right from the beginning, that presents even more opportunities for customization. Durham points to the fireplace and vaulted ceiling options that Fischer offers as examples.
Sunrooms are popular among those with green thumbs, as the plentiful natural light makes them ideal for houseplants. You can even run plumbing to the sunroom to make watering easier, though that’s going to cost more.
“An abundance of windows is highly sought after, as they flood the interior with natural light,” Durham says.
Conversely, if your goal is to bring the outdoors in, a screened porch offers better ventilation than a sunroom does. It may also offer more privacy from the outside, as those great big sunroom windows allow a lot of eyeballs into your space.
Cost and ease of installation
Cost is an area in which screened porches have a marked advantage: They are often considerably cheaper than sunrooms. A prefabricated DIY sunroom might carry a slightly lower cost than an elaborate screened porch, but these cases are the exception and not the rule. Odds are, you’re going to be shelling out a lot more cash for a sunroom.
The construction costs more. The materials – think flooring, insulation, drywall, even furniture – cost more. The additional heating, air conditioning and electricity cost more. The permitting is likely to cost more, too, and be more complicated to boot, even if the builder or contractor handles the relevant paperwork. You could also face more cost on the front end if you spring for more energy-efficient windows, but those, at least, will save money over time.
A screened porch, on the other hand? Inexpensive compared to a sunroom, even cheaper if you already have a porch and just want to add screening to it, even cheaper than that if the porch is already covered. Permits are easier to obtain, too, and in some areas, if you’re just adding screens to an existing porch, you may not need a permit at all.
If you have a homeowners’ association, you may need to seek approval there, too, and obtaining that approval can be trickier with a sunroom than with a screened porch.
On top of that, a sunroom takes longer to install, often several months. Installation time for a screened porch is more like four to six weeks, less if there’s already a porch in place. Maibach notes, though, that adding a roof and other elements to a porch increases its load, which may require rebuilding the foundation if it can’t handle the additional weight.
“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, I’ll just put some walls up,’ but then the foundation doesn’t hold up and it starts to sink,” he says.
More to mull over
Because it’s entirely enclosed, a sunroom offers far greater temperature control than a screened porch does. A porch can make up some of that ground through judicious use of ceiling fans and electric space heaters, but you’re still going to have the devil’s own time using it in the winter (at least here in Ohio).
Then there’s maintenance to keep in mind. With a screened porch, you’ll need to clean the space and the screens, and every now and then, you’ll need to replace damaged screens. Sunrooms and their furniture require cleaning, too, but not as often, as they’re less subject to the elements.
Finally, you should consider the future of the home. Do you intend to live there long enough to enjoy the benefits of an expensive sunroom? Do you expect them to affect the value of the home? Sunrooms are sometimes sought-after, and – unlike screened porches – they count as additional square footage, which could boost the price.
Garth Bishop is a contributing editor at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
