Quote:
Originally Posted by lawgolfer
I golf a minimum of 4X/wk on the championship courses and have seen thousands of lanais close up. The number of times I have seen a homeowner using his/her lanai is minimal. I have probably seen 10 homeowners or contractors cleaning the lanai, pool, or spa for every homeowner actually using the lanai. They look nice, but just aren't used.
With that thought in mind, when we did an extensive remodel of our home, we converted the lanai to another room of the house. We removed the sliding glass door between the house and the lanai; framed the opening; removed the screening etc; poured concrete to raise the floor of the lanai to match the floor of the house; added a knee wall that was under the area covered by the house's roof; framed above the knee wall; added regular windows in the new wall; laid flooring matching the rest of the house; added a mini-split heat/air; and, added a door in the new exterior wall leading to a small patio for access to our gas grill.
We now have a new large, "family" room in our house and a TV theater which is the most used room in the house, compared to a lanai which was seldom used.
As lanais are not included in the square footage of the house for purposes of the county's property tax, while our new room is, there was a minor increase in our taxes.
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We did the exact same thing to our screened lanai. We absolutely love the added square footage of home and that room looks over a golf course and pond, so it's beautiful. We didn't put in a mini-split; instead we added extensions to our 18 year old regular A/C system and changed out the whole unit for one that is 1/2 ton more capacity.
We do pay close to $1,000 more in taxes per year, but it's worth it.