Solarium installation in Palmdale CA - a bright glass room that stays comfortable

Most calls I get about a solarium come from people who want more use out of the back of the house and worry a glass room will just be hot, and that's a fair worry. The price mostly moves with the size of the room, how much of the roof is glass, the kind of glass, the condition of the slab or deck it sits on and whether you want it heated and cooled. The schedule usually turns on what we find under the room and on the permit and its inspections. If you'd rather have more wall and less glass, a sunroom addition may suit you better. After I measure and go over your options, I send you a written estimate with your own figure.

A solarium starts with what's underneath it, so I begin by checking the slab, deck or ground the room will sit on and where its roof will meet the house, because that joint is where leaks start if nobody looks closely. A room with this much glass takes in a lot of sun, so we spend real time with you on the roof and the glass, weighing how much daylight you want against how comfortable the room will be in the afternoon, and we plan the shade and vents before anything is ordered. Once you've signed off on every choice, our crew sets the base, frames the walls and roof, ties the room into the house and flashes the joint, lapping metal over the seam so water runs off instead of in. Then we set the glass, fit the doors and clean up.

If a full enclosure is more than you're after, a patio cover gives you shade over the slab without the glass, and plenty of people start there. When you're still deciding how big the room should be, which way it should face or how much of the roof should be glass, our sunroom design work lets you settle those questions on paper before we build.

Before anything else, I check who issues the permit for your address, because some homes with a Palmdale mailing address sit in unincorporated LA County and not in the city at all. When the City of Palmdale covers you, its Building and Safety office oversees building work on homes, and every permit application there has to include a plan for how construction waste will be handled. When your job needs a permit, we handle that paperwork with whichever office covers your address, whether that's the city, LA County or Kern County, and we set up the inspections. One thing surprises people. The city's standard patio cover plan only allows covers that are partly enclosed, with screens or removable plastic in the openings and no framed windows, so a room with framed glass is outside what that plan covers.

Around here a lot of solariums go onto an existing patio slab or an older deck, and I'd rather find a crack or a soft board at the estimate than after the glass is up. We see the same mix of slabs and decks on jobs in Lancaster and Quartz Hill, and the address check comes first there too.