You want a patio. Around here, the hill usually has other ideas.

That is not a design opinion, it is a topography problem, and Josie Davis of H & H Construction runs into it constantly with homeowners in and around Cookeville:

“a lot of customers want a patio, want the feel of a patio, but they cannot have it because we’re in Cookeville, Tennessee. There’s a lot of mountain ranges. You can’t have a patio without flat land. honestly, excavation is incredibly expensive. So it’s pretty costly to try to level some land to have a patio built.”

— Josie Davis, H & H Construction

The workaround everyone here has landed on

A deck does not need level ground, because the posts do the levelling for you.

“with a deck you have post set in the ground your your actual level your ground doesn’t have to be level for a deck to be level so they use that and they want to get a patio feel”

— Josie Davis

Which is why the local vernacular looks the way it does. Once you are chasing a patio feel on a deck structure, you end up adding cover, and that produces the shapes you see all over the Upper Cumberland: “that’s why you’ll often see um like lean-to style roofs you might see a gazebo pop up you might see like a a grill area we’ve done grill areas with a pergola we’ve done pergola areas on decks.”

So what is a sunroom, exactly?

It is a genuinely fuzzy category, and Josie’s definition is the most useful one I have heard because it starts from the experience rather than the construction:

“if you were asking me, a sunroom is being outside and enjoying outside without being outside. So a sunroom is by nature an addition to a home or a closing in of a space that maybe is already there.”

— Josie Davis

Which means a sunroom is often not built from scratch. It is built out of something you already have:

“We’ve seen, we’ve created sunrooms out of decks to give you an instance… We’ve also made sunrooms out of like last minute add-on sheds. And then they’re like, okay, we love this and we want this to be bigger.”

— Josie Davis

An existing deck, an awning, a front or back porch, a shed that turned out to be in the right place. If you are wondering whether a sunroom is affordable, the honest first question is what structure you already own that could become one.

What separates a sunroom from a room with windows

The design constraint follows directly from the definition. If the point is to feel outside, solid walls defeat it:

“typically sunrooms, yes, would bring the elements of nature inside. So you’re looking at lots of windows. You want it to be really open. You typically would see like sunroofs in those. skylights in those… with that perspective then you don’t want solid walls because you’re not engaging the elements of nature if your walls are solid.”

— Josie Davis

How to choose between the three

• Patio — you want to walk out through sliding doors, sit down under partial cover and be in the yard. Needs level ground, or the excavation budget to create it.
• Deck, or covered deck — you want the patio experience on sloped ground. Posts solve the grade. A pergola, lean-to roof or awning gets you the cover.
• Sunroom — you want to be outside in weather that will not let you. Windows, skylights, minimal solid wall, and very often built onto or out of something already standing.

The question that should come before all three is the one Josie asks every client: what do you want the space to feel like when you walk into it? Sitting under a pergola on a summer evening and reading a book in January are different answers, and they build different rooms.

One thing to check before you commit

If your project is an enclosure rather than a covering, it becomes an addition, and additions have to answer to the roofline. Josie has watched homeowners abandon projects entirely because the existing roofline and the new one could not be reconciled. Her standard for a finished addition applies just as much to a sunroom: it should not feel like an addition. You should be able to walk through the house from one end to the other without the building telling you where the old part stopped.

Quotes are taken verbatim from the raw recording of the Unscripted interview with Josie Davis, trimmed only for false starts and filler.