Yesterday I finished all the mortar between the stones on the front porch. Now I only have to give it 16 hours to fully heal. So, today at 1:00 pm, I’ll be ready to prime and paint the baseboard, and that’s it! I can’t wait to show you the finished baseboard tomorrow.
But in the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about our sunroom. As you know, I can’t stand this solarium. It’s a complete eyesore in the back of our house. The plan has always been to tear down the sunroom and add a new addition to the back of our house. But in recent years, that plan seemed to become more of a dream than a firm plan. First, there was COVID and disrupted supply lines that caused prices to skyrocket (some of them doubling, tripling, and quadrupling during that time). And now, with an uncertain economy, the idea of doing such a big project and putting so much money into an expansion really scares me.
So if you’ve been following me, you know that my latest plan has been to live with the sunroom, even though I really hate it, and do a low-budget renovation as a temporary solution in the hopes that we can still add it at some point in the future. I was hoping to get away with ripping out the old finishes (nasty carpet, asphalt siding, old paneling, drop ceilings, etc.) and giving everything a coat or two of paint, and then using half the room as our home gym and the other half as a living room with a TV for Matt so I could get my breakfast room back into a proper dining area with a table and chairs.
But two things are making me rethink my super-cheap makeover plan. The first problem is this back door. This is the original sliding door that was here when we bought the house.
Not only is it ugly, but it doesn’t even close completely. When “closed”, there is still a small gap between the door and the frame. I’ve done everything I can to get it to close properly, but no matter what I do, nothing seems to help. Furthermore, opening the door is almost impossible. I have to put all my weight and strength against the edge of the door to get it to open completely. So, just for safety and practicality reasons, this door needs to be replaced if this is going to be a room we’re actually going to spend time in. And since I want the backyard to be clean and look nice and usable, obviously this gate needs to be usable too. And if I’m going to go to the trouble of making the yard nice, I don’t want the view to be spoiled by an ugly back door.
I would like to replace that sliding glass door with the same doors I have at the back entrance to my studio, since they are both visible from the back of our house.
So replacing the door is not just a “wish.” I think it is an absolute “must have” for practicality and safety reasons. But that leaves me with the ugly sunroom windows. Since I’ve spent a lot of time working in the garage over the past few weeks while preparing stones for the front porch baseboard, I’ve had a lot of time to look at these ugly windows and the entire back of the sunroom. I really can’t stand the fact that we have nice new windows and doors on part of the back of our house, and then this huge sunroom eyesore with these old aluminum windows.
At first I thought there was no way I wanted to even consider replacing these windows in a sunroom I really want to tear down. Replacing the windows just makes it feel even more permanent and like I should give up on my dream of a new addition entirely.
Excuse the overgrown jungle look of our backyard. I haven’t had any motivation (and any time) to clean this area because…why should I prioritize this? Even if it is cleaned, it will look ugly. But as you can see, this room has so many big windows, so that’s another reason I hadn’t even considered replacing them.
But yesterday, as I was working in the garage again and looking at this mess, dreaming of the possibilities, I had an epiphany. Buying new windows to replace these old, drafty, single-pane windows doesn’t mean I have to give up on my dream of having an addition. I just need to make sure to order windows that can be reused whenever we build our addition. As long as the new windows are the right size for that addition, they can simply be removed when we are ready to tear down this sunroom and then reinstalled in the addition.
I think this might be the best solution. It’s definitely more work than I had planned to put into the sunroom makeover later this year, but I think it’s the smartest solution. If we keep these old aluminum windows for now, we really won’t want to spend any time in the sunroom. The windows are old and drafty, so the room is very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter. The new windows will help with that. And then we will have them on hand for when we are ready to build the expansion. And in the event that the addition is never built, and if that is a dream I really need to leave behind, at least we will have a usable room with adequate windows.
So that’s what I’m planning for now. My super cheap and easy sunroom makeover is still much more involved than I had originally planned. But I think this is the way to go. While I really don’t want this room to be a permanent fixture in our home, it should be livable and comfortable while we have it and while we use it. But I can do it without completely giving up on that dream of eventually tearing it down and rebuilding it. And as long as you replace doors and windows with ones that can be used in a future addition, that money won’t be wasted.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 upper that my husband Matt and I purchased in 2013. Matt has MS and can’t do physical work, so I do most of the house work myself. You can learn more about me here.
