Changing conservatory into usable room

[3ormoredogs]

Please can anyone offer any advice?

I have an old lean to conservatory leading off the dining room to the garden. It’s old and annoying as it means I can’t see the children playing in the garden unless I sit in there (no pottering about the house for me!) It also needs its roof replaced as it’s leaking.

If it wasn’t there I could open the space with huge bifolds but DH wants to keep it as he thinks it adds space and another room (he very occasionally works in there during summer)

I want to remove the old sliding doors to the dining room and open up the space. How can I make it not freezing? Are warm roof type things worth it and if so which type? Are glass roofs any warmer than plastic?

Has anyone done this and regretted it?

I put a roof on my conservatory. I decided against sliding doors, which I wanted but the cost was high. Instead I left the French windows in place and leave them fully open most of the time. I used rugs to make it look more like one long room.

yes the roof helped keep a better temperature

No me, but a friend changed their conservatory roof for a real roof (insulted, tiles etc). It has transformed the space and it now feels like a proper room. It's a large conservatory (and has brick walls below the windows if that makes sense). The roof replacement was around £15-16k. The windows were not replaced - they considered it but decided it was too expensive.

Aren't there companies that put a solid roof on pre existing glass roofed conservatories ?
I'm sure I've seen them advertised.

When you say it's a "lean to", do you mean it isn't a brick built conservatory?? If the former not worth doing. If the latter, yes you upgrade the roof as nd it makes a huge difference. We had an old, but large and expensive conservatory, with old standard glass roof, upgraded to new standard glass roof. It is now warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and much more usable. We use it every day, DH has his TV in there, the piano is in there, full sofa, rugs etc etc

We did this. Bricked up the door to outside replaced the windows (and got rid of 2 of them) & put a solid roof on. It's properly insulated apart from the floor & it cost about £24k but is now my home office & acts like a proper room. It has an electric radiator.

We inherited it, so I don't know the cost, but the previous owners of our house added a proper roof to their conservatory to make what we can "the sunroom".

Like yours, it comes off the dining room.

The sun room has 180' windows and double doors , overlooking the garden. The dining room has two pairs of double doors leading to the sun room (covering most of the connecting wall, only about 18 inches of wall between the doors). The living room is joined to the dining room also by double doors. So we can see from the living room, through the dining room, through the sunroom into the garden.

The sunroom still gets warmer in summer and colder in winter than the other rooms, but is usable 365. It's the best room in the house and a primary reason we bought the property

Thankyou everyone!

It’s half brick. Windows/glass door on 2 sides. Full plastered wall to the other side and a leaning roof rather than a pitched one.
I think it would need a new roof and windows at the very least. It’s not very big though, enough for a sofa, chair and a coffee table but that’s it! It’s more about opening up the space so we get more open space as at the moment the conservatory blocks the dining room if that makes any sense, so you have to go through it to get to the garden.

Do blinds etc keep any warmth in?

Following with interest op as this is similar to what we'd like to do with our conservatory.

We inherited 30k after my lovely FIL sadly passed away. We were thinking of getting a new kitchen but would also love to make the conservatory next to it into a useable family room. It's a small galley kitchen with a sliding double glazed door separating it from the conservatory. Ideally the two rooms would flow into each other and we'd put a dining table, plus sofa, tv etc in the current conservatory.

Judging by the cost for putting on a proper roof pp have mentioned, we wouldn't have much left to do anything else! Are there any other cheaper options? The conservatory is north facing and in shade most of the day, so freezing most of the year. Then often too hot in summer because of the plastic roof and 3 sides of double glazed windows (one wall is all brick as it's joined to the one room extension built by previous owners and dh uses as his office)

@Ivyy A north-facing conservatory might be good for some plants, but hardly for people. If I were you, I'd ask builders for quotes to extend the kitchen on to the footprint if the conservatory. Good luck.

I was quoted 2k for my roof by one person and 5k by another. That wasn’t for any work to walls/plastering etc though literally just roof.

We replaced the old polycarbonate roof with a fiberglass imitation tile roof. It looks like tile but is light enough for the walls to support it. We also added an air to air heat pump air conditioning unit which also heats in winter. The conservatory has gone from hitting 50°C in summer and dropping to -1°C in winter(!) to being a useable space which we regularly sit in.

We inherited a room which the previous owners had ‘converted’ from a conservatory. They had replaced the windows on a dwarf wall, so that is okay. The solid roof though has caused endless trouble, it was not done to a high spec and so leaked badly, first when the wind blew , then as it degraded nearly all the time.

We had it patched up but finally have replaced the whole thing with new roofing batons and cross timbers. It is covered with a fibreglass content sheeting which looks a bit like roofing felt as on a shed ( GRP fibreglass ‘flat roof ‘ system , twenty year guarantee). The roof is a low pitch as a lot of lean to are. This seems to work really well.

So it isn’t worth skimping on the roof!

My brother had the conservatory roof changed into a tiled insulated roof with velux window and it really did make a difference. They also took out the internal French doors. Having no doors does help the warm air to circulate from the main part of the house.