Adding A Baseboard Heater For More Wrapped up Square Footage

How did we gain a ton of extra square footage to take our for-sale casa from 1300 wrapped up square feet to 1550 in the last 48 hours? We will give you a hint: we did not add an overnight addition. We simply brought in a permanent heat source to our existing sunroom… and now it counts as livable square footage!

A realtor friend of ours advised us that rooms do not need to be heated and cooled to count as “wrapped up” here in Richmond – simply heated. Meaning the only thing keeping the biggest room in our house (our sunroom) from getting counted as official square footage was a source of heat. So we called a few electricians and got some estimates for a six foot baseboard heater to be hardwired and installed, which should certainly keep the room pleasant and toasty on a crisp winter day (assuming the sliding doors are all closed of course). The winning bid was $250 and within 48 hours it was done-zo. Yup, our former three season room can now be used year round.

Here is what the breaker box looked like when the job was in progress:

Let us simply say that we are glad that we did not attempt to Hands-on it ourselves (messing with the main breaker box while the house was on the market simply sounded like a bad idea, and the installers in fact had to drill through the concrete sunroom floor and wire things up through the basement and the crawl space so we are glad we left it up to the pros).

The most lively part of the project for us? Changing our fliers from 1300 square feet to 1550, which makes the dollar per square foot ratio even better for any potential house hunters (and now we will not lose people who’ve set a must-be-at-least-1500-square-feet search parameter). Plus with our sunroom being one of the most excellent rooms in our whole house, we must admit that it certainly hurt when it could not be counted as anything before. Does not that room deserve a little enjoy? Well, the problem is now officially solved. Sunroom: you count.

We like how crisp and streamlined the baseboard heater looks installed at the foot of the brick wall. And the straightforward-use dial (marked off, low, med, and high) is all anyone needs to heat things up whenever the mood strikes.

The more pricey solution would have been to install a one-room heat pump system (estimates for that ranged from 2-3K) but our realtor friend in fact recommended the baseboard solution over the heat pump since it is such a plain and inexpensive upgrade (and it is typically all that people need from a sunroom anyway). So that is how we gained 250 more wrapped up square feet – for only about a dollar per square foot.

Have any of you folks “wrapped up” an nearly-wrapped up space in your house (either to sell it or enjoy it)? We are kind of sad it took us this long to tackle Project Baseboard in our sunroom since it is certainly one of our go-to rooms. Who knows how much we could have used it in the last four winters that we have spent here!

Note: For anyone who goes this route, we suggest getting an impartial appraisal so the updated square footage can be verified and recorded on record for your protection! Also remember that you may have to inform the county that you’ve expanded your square footage and may need to pay taxes on that area (we already pay taxes on the sunroom, garage, basement, and other unfinished areas but we still plan to double check that we have done all that we need to do for this square footage to officially “count”). And remember that distinct areas have distinct rules, so check yours out before diving in.