If you’ve been looking for a way to boost your home’s value and at the same time create an innately pleasant outdoor living space to your home, adding a new screen room might be the best choice for you.
The basic screened porch design is an enclosed porch or deck, like a three-season patio, but the four-season screen room is enclosed and can even be climate-controlled all year round, depending on the design you choose. Because adding a screen room like this adds living space and increases your home’s livable square footage, it’s one of the best investments you can make to increase your home’s value. Read on to find out more on how a screen room adds value to your home.
What Are Screened Porches?
A typically built screen room is a screened-in porch attached to your house that has large windows and/or screens to bring in the sunlight from outside. These patio enclosures can be a great place to set up a breakfast room, workout area, conversation pits for visitors or any other use you can think of for the extra living space, such as a second family room or a master suite living area.
How Is a Screen Porch Room Different From a Covered Patio Space?
At first glance, a screened-in porch is similar to some other outdoor remodeling projects that add usable space to increase your home’s value. A screen porch is often built to enclose a deck or patio, for example, and enclosing a formerly outdoor area is similar to the design of a covered porch. Where a screened room addition is different is in the large glass or screen walls it has to protect guests from bugs and rainy weather.
Twice the Attractiveness, Indoors
The fact that a screened porch is enclosed is probably the screen room’s biggest point of difference from patios, porches and decks. Unlike these open structures, the screened-in porch can add livable square footage and more value by screening in the additional area to protect guests and family members from the outdoors. This can be done with traditional window screens big enough to surround the whole porch addition to create a cozy three-season room.
Opt Out of Colder Climates
A screened-in porch differs from other kinds of porch enclosure mainly as a matter of degree. Where a new porch or a new deck is open to your backyard and can add monetary value when you sell the property, these are only a good bet in mild climates. In places where you get bugs in summer or snow in winter, screened-in porches can make a wonderful addition with a high average return for most homeowners.
Versatile Outdoor living Spaces
Of all the home improvements you can make to increase your home’s value, screened porches might be the most versatile. When you decide to go with a screened-in porch, you’re not just making a good investment; you’re adding several hundred square feet of additional area where you and your guests can relax in the warm weather as you would on open porches. Drop the screens and you can still get the morning or evening breeze without the bugs that can spoil your enjoyment of the outdoors. Opt into a screened-in porch to have an affordable sunroom that can add value to the investment you’ve made in your home.
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How a Screen Room Adds Value to Your Home
There’s a lot to be said for what a screened-in porch does for a property. Because of the unique blend of indoor and outdoor this type of area represents, you can get the best of both worlds with almost none of the negatives. Benefits of screen rooms include:
- More sunshine in the rainy summer months
- Extra space to set up one of those recreation rooms you’ve always wanted
- Enclosing your existing patio/deck area and giving you fresh wall space for adding a custom deck beyond that
Screened-in porches are usually set up to get the most natural light possible. By enclosing an existing porch or deck with large screens, you can create a space that gets every available ray of natural sunlight that reaches your house, even when it’s muggy with mosquitoes in Maryland.
How Screened Porches Deliver Return on Investment
Adding a screen room is one of the fastest ways to bump up the market value of your home. A property’s value is ultimately just the price buyers are willing to pay for it, so anything that makes your house more desirable to potential buyers drives up the value it has.
In up-and-coming housing markets like Maryland and Virginia especially, adding a screen room can be the bump that sets your property apart and makes it one of the more valuable homes in the local market. There are several reasons for this:
The first benefit a screen room brings is also the simplest: It adds floor space. Open outdoor areas, such as a deck or a patio, are not usually counted as adding to the overall floor area of your home. Rules vary from place to place, but because an enclosed screen room is more like an extension of your house than an outside living space, it’s likely to become part of the home’s livable square footage.
In a place like Fairfax County, where the average home price per square foot went from $274 to $311 between 2020 and 2022, every extra inch of square footage can be a big addition to your home’s value. The average screen room in Maryland and Northern Virginia adds 4%-6% to a single-family home’s price at about half the cost of a regular addition, which is a massive return on investment.
This increase helps you recover the project cost fairly quickly. Even though the full project cost isn’t the only factor motivating a homeowner to add square footage, it does help with the decision when you can increase the natural beauty of the home and the home’s value in one fell swoop.
There’s no end to what you can do with a screen room addition. Because so many screen rooms start with adding a custom deck and then enclosing it, it’s common for Virginia and Maryland homeowners to fill them with patio furniture, like Adirondack chairs. You could also treat the extra square footage more like a room inside your house and set up a breakfast screen room, morning coffee station or even a rec room for entertaining guests. Other screen room purposes include:
- Adding workout equipment to build a home fitness room
- Putting in cubbies and toy chests to make a kids’ playroom
- Adding interior finishing, including ceiling fans and electrical wiring, to make a master suite screen room
- Making it a game room with a pool table, poker or blackjack set, chess table and vintage arcade/pinball machines
- Setting up a table and benches for rainy-day picnics or ideal spaces for kids’ parties
All these options make a screen room one of the most versatile rooms in your house. That variety of uses appeals to homebuyers and adds to the resale value of your home. The fact that a glorious screen room tends to be a bright and cheery place all year long is just another way a screen room adds value to your house.
Add Value to Your Home With a Screen Room Now
With homeowners in the Capitol Corridor spending more time at home than ever before, making that home a restful, beautiful place has never been more important than it is today. With home prices in the Northern Virginia-Maryland area rising the way they’ve been for many years, there’s almost never been a more competitive real estate market.
A screen room addition adds to your home in both these areas. The expert builders at Prince William Home Improvement can help you plan, design and build the screen room of your dreams. A free estimate is available to homeowners throughout the Maryland and Northern Virginia areas. Get in touch today and find out how adding a custom screen room can increase the value of your house and make your home feel brighter and more inviting.
