Our Inexpensive Sunroom Makeover

I have a love/hate relationship with my sunroom. It has undergone multiple inexpensive makeovers in the 25+ years we’ve been in our house. This room was one of the reasons why we bought our home. It makes our house feel so much more open than if there was a solid wall on the end of the dining room. But as much as we love it it’s also been a pain to decorate or assign a purpose.

The room started out as just a basic sunroom. We bought some wicker furniture to set in it and some plants but we really didn’t hang out much in there. The room was hot in the summer and the wicker wasn’t comfortable to sit in. We had no kids at the time so our cats were the only ones to use the room. I don’t think we realized at the time just how ugly the room really was.

Soon after we’d been here a year or so I got into crafts. I used our spare bedrooms as a craft room at different times. Eventually the kids took over the bedrooms and my craft room relocated to the sunroom.

It was around the time that I got pregnant with #2 that we decided to revamp the sunroom. We had already given the back room a makeover before #1 was born so we knew we could do it. Because we live in a mobile home our walls are vinyl wallpaper covered drywall. We were afraid to paint it for fear of it peeling. This led us to tear out almost every piece of drywall and replace it with regular drywall. This was a hard and dusty project.

My husband and I did 99% of the work ourselves. We bought drywall tools and asked others for advice. We tore out the fake wood around the windows and replaced it with wood found in the trim section at Lowe’s. Lucky for us I wanted to go with white trim (the house had faux regular wood trim throughout) so we were able to buy painter’s grade trim which helped save some money. We were looking to save money with every design choice. One compromise we made was to go with a more narrow door and window trim. It works for us and it’s something that we can change out down the road if we want.

At this point we had ripped the carpet back, re-drywalled the room, trimmed out the windows and painted. Nothing too expensive. When the room was about finished we re-laid the carpet again. The only thing we didn’t finish was the trim on the top two windows and sliding glass door and the crown molding. Our house came with faux wood crown molding but we tore it down in demo. It really was not worth saving. We figured we’d buy nicer molding to hang, which we did and ended up getting a relative to install it.

The sunroom housed my craft room for years. But it housed other things, too. Slowly it morphed into my kids’ playroom hosting many tea parties, stuffed animal conventions and Barbie soirées. Still the corner remained mine. I’ll never forget the day my youngest daughter was with me painting crafts and I left the room for a minute only to return to see her finger painting (only it was her entire hand) the table, front of my little TV and the wall. This is the same daughter who “painted” her sister’s bed frame with yogurt. And she still loves to paint! But I digress … Anyway, it had come time to repaint the room again.

I grew tired of the buttery yellow color and wanted something a little more neutral. We ended up repainting it a light camel color. At the same time I grew to dislike the crown molding. There was something about it that I didn’t like so we tore it down. So now we had a newly painted sunroom/playroom/junk collecting room with no trim around the ceiling or door. We finally did trim out those two upper windows though.

As the girls grew up they used the room as a playroom less and less. It kind of became a catch-all room which I’d rearrange every couple of months. To make matters worse, the dog started having accidents on the carpet! Finally one day I grabbed a box cutter and tore out a huge chunk of it. The carpet, not the dog. Little by little I’d cut out more rug until finally it was pretty much gone. We lived with the floor bare to the wood for maybe two years.

I couldn’t find what i wanted so i waited

Now keep in mind that while we were going back and forth with these sunroom shenanigans we were also remodeling other parts of the house. So when I say we lived with the bare floors for two years, it may have been longer. We laid laminate down in the dining room/kitchen area at one point and eventually continued it into the living room. We could have run it right into the sunroom but I didn’t want to. I had my heart set on some type of stone or tile pattern. So we waited and did without.

About 2 years ago we repainted the sunroom because of scuffs and dings. We decided then we wanted to turn the sunroom into another TV room. This meant that my craft room had to get packed up and moved into storage downstairs. We ended up painting the room the same shade we had before, a light camel color. But when Lowe’s mixed up our paint it was darker than before. Of course we didn’t know until we started rolling it on the walls but I still liked the color.

We found a sectional by Trisha Yearwood that we fell in love with!! We chose her Jaxon sectional in a grayish beige fabric and it’s so comfy, like a big old hug. I always say you don’t sit on it you lounge on it. With 8 weeks till delivery we needed to find a floor fast.

Then one day we were at Ollie’s Bargain Outlet and saw a really cool stone patterned laminate. I was very drawn to it and loved the brown, beige and grey tones in it. Previously we purchased our wood laminate flooring from Ollie’s and were very happy with it so we took the plunge and bought all of what they had in stock of this new flooring.

The hubs and I are not contractors but we installed our other flooring with no problems but this flooring was horrible. I don’t know how many times I asked to take it back. We finally realized that this floor was meant to be pieced together differently than our other laminate. Instead of staggering seams these large pieces lined up with the seams all in a line. No wonder the stone pattern wasn’t matching up earlier. Once we realized this the floor went in pretty easily.

I love the floor we chose. It’s not hard to care for and the colors tie the whole room together.

We consider this room 95% finished. We still have to put molding around the base, ceiling, and door and that will happen eventually. I really like how it turned out. It’s much more relaxing and cozy than it ever was. I’ve even unpacked my craft supplies and claimed a spot in the corner again.

Our inexpensive sunroom makeover was completed in stages over a couple of years. The two largest expenses (besides furniture) were the trim/wood and flooring. Even with those things being the most costly we still spent less on them than we could have by making cost-effective choices. We were willing to compromise on items like trim width knowing it doesn’t really bother us and it’s something that can be changed out pretty easily if we change our minds. The flooring is not tile but I love the look and it’s perfectly acceptable for our needs. Would I choose those same items again? Absolutely.