Four season sunrooms in Calabasas CA - a room you'll use every month of the year

Open it to the house if you want the room to feel like part of your home, and keep it separate if you'd rather run it as its own zone. A room open to the house counts as lived-in, conditioned space, while a separate one is closed off from the house's heating and cooling and has its own temperature control. Neither is better on paper, so it comes down to how you'll use the room.

It mostly comes down to the room's size, since a smaller room can often run off the system you have and a larger one may need equipment of its own. Either way, the room needs heating and cooling in place to stay comfortable in both summer and winter, so this is a step to plan, not skip. When I come out, I look at your system and the room size together.

Four season rooms across the US usually cost about $190 to $330 per square foot, and that's a national figure for the market, not our price. Where your room lands depends on its size, whether it opens to the house, the frame and glass you choose and the heating and cooling plan. The written estimate after I've measured gives you your own number.

Every project starts with the city's Planning Division, and a home addition under 500 square feet goes to a public hearing where the Community Development Director acts as the hearing officer. That hearing comes before building, so it shapes the start date. We're licensed and fully insured, we take care of the permit paperwork when one is needed, and we keep you posted along the way.

Start with the fire zone, because CAL FIRE's Fire Hazard Severity Zone map for Calabasas shows whether your lot is in a high or very high zone, and homes there may have extra state building code and defensible space requirements. If you plan to pull the permit yourself as an owner-builder, the city asks for a Property Owner's Disclosure, and the city's Building and Safety Division answers questions at BuildingSafetyInfo@cityofcalabasas.com or (818)-224-2534. We check this for every address we work at, here and in the cities around Calabasas like Agoura Hills, Westlake Village and Malibu.

Pay the most attention to the glass and the walls, because a room with this much window gains and loses most of its heat there. California's Energy Code sets standards for a building's outer shell and for its windows and doors, and they vary by the climate zone the house sits in. For a room open to the house, the sunroom industry's specification also has the windows meet requirements for keeping out air and water and for heat loss, and the frame choice I covered above matters too.