I'm not sure whose idea it was to add a sunroom to this house. Probably mine. I would love to be able to go back in time and slap myself into not making this ill-informed decision. Just about everything that could go wrong with a room has gone wrong with our sunroom. I don't know about you but I'm getting REALLY tired of the format of this site which is basically 1) Original contractor messed up badly 2) We suffered 3) We tried to fix and were frustrated 4) We finally did it but are bitter about the whole process. There is only one way I can think to break this completely annoying cycle. Taking the high ground, accepting "what's done is done" and working our way through it has been the general plan and I am really hoping this will be the last time we have to do it.
So first off the sunroom is an outdoor room, new poured foundation and CMU block wall setup with a big glass sunroom kit assembled on top of it. I'm not sure how much of the fault lies with the sunroom manufacturer and how much with the installer. I'm guessing mostly with the installer who blamed it on the manufacturer. Our contractor was of course supposed to come and fix this before he de-friended me on facebook and stop returning my calls—how rude! The loss of a friend, the loss of a contractor without a finished house—both stung, but I'm over it. The sunroom has been harder to get over. For years it leaked like a sieve and we just put up with it, making the assumption that it was an outdoor room and was meant to take in some water. However the use of sheetrock on the walls didn't match this re-purposing so the water damage came, followed by mold. At one point there were mushrooms growing on our walls—that is how bad it got.
The last contractor mess-up we handled was the façade which resulted in all those lovely pieces of slate cement board coming down and being thrown away. In a flash of assumed-genius I decided to save some of these pieces and repurpose them in the sunroom instead of the sheetrock. It seemed like a great idea—both eco-friendly and aesthetically pleasing. Several weeks ago we ripped out all the sheetrock in the sunroom and started work on rebuilding the walls. We framed in wood and spent several hours making agonizing cuts to the cement board to create perfect slate panels. We devised an aluminum channel frame to separate the panels, hide the screws and contribute to the aesthetic. All seemed to be moving along.
This is how far we got before our plans came crashing to a halt:
This summer has had record low rainfall for NYC (a fact that has left our garden less than happy) but two weeks ago we got one torrential rain storm that changed everything. We finally saw where the water was coming from. Not just at the frame where the sunroom meets the CMU (despite several layers of caulk, water still seeped underneath)
But water also was seeping in underneath and behind the panels, all throughout the CMU wall and a ton at the base. It was coming out from under the wall and running onto the floor. I'm not sure what needed to be done at the get-go to avoid this, if the outside of the CMU wall needed to be sealed in some way, but whatever the case it was unfixable now. And if we proceeded with our plan we would have water seeping in behind these panels. It would be fine for a while and it would certainly look fine, we could change the wood framing to aluminum, but it would be a huge mess years later with water collecting behind the walls. We just couldn't do it and had to stop dead in our tracks.
The other issue was more aesthetic—when we realized that one of the walls was not enough remotely level. Like several inches off from being level. I can't for the life of me imagine how a BRAND NEW room could be so far off. It explains a lot about the issues we've had with this room. But the lack of square lines left us with a chance that our very square, grid-like design would looks complete wrong on such an uneven wall. So two blows, both collectively bringing us back to square one after all that planning and work.
Finally the solution came, albeit after a lot of lots time, frustration and sweat—to bring in the same stucco crew that fixed the façade and give this wall the stucco treatment—waterproof 2 inch insulation, screening and a couple of layers of stucco. This would trap the water on the inside from flowing in from the outside as well as keep the walls water proof from any water that leaked in from the panes. It was so simple we kicked ourselves for not doing it sooner.
So about 3.5 years after we moved into our unit we finally have a usable sunroom—well almost, a couple of pieces of glasses seem to have broken seals and we will be replacing them in the next couple of weeks. Actually it's much harder than I'm making it out to be as the sunroom rails have caps on them that must be completely removed and clips that must be broken and replaced in order to change out the glass pieces. And while two are accessible one is all the way on top and will require some acrobatics. But for now, I'm just going to be happy with our new leak proof walls.
Still if I could go back in time I would do things differently. The roof of the sunroom in glass was a bad idea—the roof should have been solid with a skylight maybe. And this kit systems wasn't well thought out—we probably would have been much better off designing something out of the same material we used for our glass wall—a store-front type setup. But it's fruitless to think that way…now we know for "next time".
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