I live in a 1960s-built single-story ranch in Ohio. The house was originally built with a covered back patio, floored with concrete. At some point, the original owners closed it up into a large sunroom.
The sunroom conversion was done extremely haphazardly - the exterior siding doesn’t match, carpet was laid with no padding on the concrete, the hood in the kitchen vents into it, and the walls are uninsulated and undrywalled - wainscoting panels attached directly to studs. I don’t know what the plan was, but at some point they must have been tired of it being so cold back there because they added a woodburning stove in the middle of the room (without properly screening off the chimney, so a few times a year a starling or a squirrel falls in and either breaks their neck or starves to death) and it must have too hot as they also ran wiring to install a large through-wall A/C unit.
I’m sure it’s obvious from my description but the room is impractical to use as anything but storage at this point. In the winter, it gets colder in there than in my garage but I’m not about to run that woodstove and burn my house down, and in summer it’s so leaky and humid from the poorly installed a/c unit and ancient single-pane sliding windows that every attempt to habitate it has resulted in having to clean blue mold off the walls and furniture in there. Thankfully the old patio door seals it all off pretty well, and that’s what we’ve done for the last few years since we realized just how bad the situation in there was.
I’d like to make the space functional again, especially as it would increase my square footage by around 40%, but don’t really know where to start.
Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Remove and store the stove. Take the will thing apart one layer at a time. I think your primary concern should be the electrical. Try to carefully expose any wiring. You might want to hire an electrician to trace and de-energize the space.
From your description, the odds are in favor of removing the entire structure. You might be able to salvage the building materials.
I’d be most concerned about the electrical work. Consider adding a combo smoke/CO detector ASAP.
prokyonid@lemmy.sdf.org 15 hours ago
Had an electrician go through the entire place when we first bought the house so we could get safe three-prong outlets in place of the two-prong ungrounded outlets that were originally there. Didn’t do a full rewire because there’s no ceiling access - originally, the only heatsource for the house was electric radiant ceilings, though a couple baseboards were installed at some point after initial construction. The wiring for the sunroom’s A/C is run through a conduit on the outside of the house. I replaced the original through-wall unit shortly after we moved in, and I’ve seen that whole circuit.
What about the interior wall, against what used to be the exterior of the house?
octobob@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
When you say “didn’t do a full re-wire” do you mean he left all wiring as is inside the walls and swapped 2-prong ungrounded outlets to 3-prong (which would be a bootleg ground and is illegal)
Or do you mean he ran new wire to some of the outlets and left what he couldn’t get to as 2-prong?
I’m an electrician fwiw.
Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
You should expose the conditions behind that wall.