More Room
Sunroom and Home Additions in the Twin Cities
An addition changes the outline of your house. Done well, nobody can tell where the old work stops.
Sunrooms, bedroom additions and four-season rooms
A four-season room is conditioned space: it is heated and cooled, meets the same energy code as the rest of the house, and counts toward your finished square footage. A three-season room is glazed and sheltered but not heated. It costs meaningfully less and is genuinely useful for a Minnesota summer, but it is not year-round space, and we would rather say so at the estimate than have you discover it in January.
Bedroom and family-room additions follow the same pattern as a four-season room, with the closet, plumbing or heating the room needs. A screened porch — roofed but open to the air — sits with our decks and outdoor living work.
Designed as part of the house
Before anything is drawn, the addition has to fit your lot’s setbacks and lot-coverage limits, which differ by city and sometimes by zoning district. That is checked first, because it can change the shape of what you can build.
The roof is designed first rather than last. Matching the existing pitch where it can be matched, and detailing the junction where it cannot, is what makes an addition look like part of the house. Weathered siding and roofing rarely match exactly, so where a match is not achievable we say so and suggest where to put the transition so it reads as deliberate.
The foundation is chosen for what the room is for and what the existing house sits on, and the joint between old and new is designed rather than assumed.
Living in the house while it happens
The work is sequenced so the house is open to the weather for as short a time as possible, the work area is dust-walled, and you are told in advance which days will be loud and which need the water or power off. You get one point of contact and a posted schedule, and if the schedule moves, you hear it from us.
How we price this work
You get a written scope of the work. Where it is well defined we quote a fixed price. Where it genuinely is not — an old structure, an unknown behind a wall — we work cost-plus, and we tell you which model we are using and why before you sign anything. Any change to the scope or the price is written up as a change order and agreed before the work happens.
An addition is priced by the square foot of conditioned space more than by anything you choose to put in it. What moves the number most is whether the room is conditioned, the foundation, how the new roof meets the old one, and whether the existing furnace and electrical panel can carry the added space.
Questions we get asked on site visits
- Do I need a zoning variance?
- Usually not, but it is the first thing checked, because it decides the shape of what you can build before anything is drawn. If a design does need one, we say so early, because it adds months rather than weeks.
- Four-season or three-season?
- A four-season room is conditioned space that counts toward your finished square footage and can be used in January. A three-season room is glazed and sheltered but not heated, and it costs meaningfully less. Both are genuinely useful; the mistake is paying for one and expecting the other.
- Can my furnace heat the addition?
- Sometimes. An older system may not have the capacity to serve more space, and forcing it produces a room that is cold at the far end. Where that is the case, the answer is often a separate mini-split rather than a longer duct run, and we say so at the estimate.
- Will the addition match the house?
- An exact match on weathered siding and roofing is rarely achievable. Where it is not, we suggest where to put the transition so it reads as deliberate rather than as a repair.
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