Screen rooms offer you the opportunity to bring the summer sunshine into your home. Having a screen room is cozy, and the amount of natural light that comes through makes it a great place to spend your time. With the right design, your screen room can be anything from a lounging room where you can enjoy your favorite books, to a semi-outside dining room. If your screen room is large enough, you could even make it an open-plan combination of different room types, meaning you could include both a lounging area and a dining table.

But before you can think of the inside of your screen room, you’ll need to think about what will be outside of your screen room. There’s no sense in trying to bring the outside into your home if the area outside your screen room doesn’t look as inviting as the room itself on the inside.

Getting a New Screen Room

If you’re still planning your screen room from scratch, you’re lucky to have options available. The good thing about planning a screen room from scratch is that you can consider where to place your screen room more carefully. This is a big win, because you want to choose an area of your yard that gets a lot of sun when building a new screen room. You also want to avoid building the screen room where it would block off a lot of sun to other rooms in your house.

When you’re starting from scratch, it’s possible to plan your new home addition so that you get the most out of your sun room, while still getting enough light in other areas of your home. But when you already have a sun room, you have to work with what you’ve got.

So, for those of you starting from scratch, it’s important to consider sun when deciding where to place your screen room. Ideally, you want to choose the area that’s most sunny all year, while also avoiding too much loss of sunlight in the rooms adjacent to your sun room.

If you don’t want to lose any light in your house, you could consider building a screen room that’s completely separate. You could do this by building a gazebo instead of adding the sun room onto your house. However, this option won’t be well if you want your sun room to be a living area. Gazebos are good if you want a space outside where you can enjoy meals without being completely exposed to the elements. But your family is unlikely to spend as much time in a gazebo as they would in a sun room that’s part of your house.

Planning the View

There are multiple ways to build a screen room. You could have a screen porch, where you’re basically adding screening around your deck or patio, but your screen room can also be an entirely new addition to your home.

If you’re planning to build a new room onto your home, you might want to consider where your deck or patio will be in the new design.

You could, for instance, build a screen room that opens up to your deck or patio if you want a large area that feel open. This is great for when you regularly entertain guests. As the deck or patio could have a dining table whereas the sun room would be a lounging area. The benefit of this is that the view from your sun room will be whatever is on your deck or patio, so a beautifully decorated deck with a few potted plants will give you a nice view that ought to stay much the same all year long.

However, if your sun room doesn’t open up to your deck or patio, you’ll need to plan the view outside more carefully. The key to planning your garden outside the sun room is to consider what it will look like in every season. In summer, it’s easy to plant flowers that make your garden feel bright and fragrant, but it’s much harder in the winter, seeing as many flowers die, and the multi-seasonal plants that don’t die off every winter, don’t typically flower in winter.

There isn’t much you can do to help this problem, as you can’t control when plants will be in flower. For this reason, you might want to think about adding color and visually interesting things to your garden that aren’t seasonal. You could do this by adding statues, evergreen trees, or by using colorful pots for your potted plants.

When choosing what plants to use in your garden design, it’s also best to add a few multi-seasonal plants that you won’t have to replant each year, otherwise your summer garden will be very high maintenance. Consider planting some lavender, roses or other shrub-like plants that flower. The great thing about lavender is that it’s an all-around good plant to have. Not only does it flower, it also smells wonderful and it can even be used in cooking.

Just remember to place your multi-seasonal plants strategically so you still have space to play around in your garden after planting them. These plants are great if you don’t want to start your garden from scratch every year, but if you plant them in the wrong place they might become a nuisance when you want to plant other things.

So, are you ready to add a new sun room to your home? Be sure to call Sunrooms Express Knoxville! We specialize in helping you bring the nature indoors with expertly installed sun rooms.