Have you considered just having a 4 season sunroom added at the back? Change windows to French door and close up the door in the nook.

Thanks for your response, Louis. I’m new to remodeling, so this may be a stupid question, but why would half the house need to be re-engineered? A new wall would be built and concrete added to the slab in this area. What am I missing or not understanding?

The slab is not the right slab to expand the house. All across the back of te house will need to be blended in with this addition .This will be an addition there is no other way to do this and for sure not for less than 100K at least where I live Best IMO an architect who can tie this into the main house and make it look like it has always been there which IMO is every addition should look.

Jackoeskip, originally I was planning on doing that, but not turning the porch into a sunroom. The purpose would have been to remove the door from the breakfast room and bring in banquette seating in an attempt to increase seating in the breakfast room (which is our only eating area in the house).

Then I came up with the plan in the post as it would increase our dining space and give us a new place for our piano, and freeing up our front room to turn into a study/office.

Jay W, I am a layperson, not a contractor or engineer. But I have a similar space in my home that includes a door off the breakfast nook like yours does, but has a huge picture window where you have the 3 windows. I also thought we could surely easily bump out into the space created by our roof overhang, which is, like yours, over a concrete slab. My inquiries resulted in me learning that in our case, the little concrete freebie patio was not an extension of the actual concrete slab foundation of the house so we would have to tear that out and pour a whole new section of foundation that would have to be tied in. And that wasn’t going to be cheap. It would’ve gained us about three feet of space in our family room and wasn’t close to being worth the big pile of money it would cost. We scrapped the idea very quickly. Your situation may be different.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I definitely need to figure out a different way to, at minimum, increase our dining space.

@Jay W

Do you have the original plans for your house? There was no dining room? Maybe you can post your floor plan. It sounds like you may have outgrown this house. Before spending a lot of money to add on, see what a larger home would cost.

Renovations may involve structural issues, as well as increasing your HVAC capacity. And there could be code issues that would need to be brought up to current standards.

Hi, Jay,

It's hard to size up a project from photos. Yours appears pretty straightforward. Don't abandon your idea until you've had an opportunity for one or more local contractors to give you a ballpark estimate of the cost to make it happen.

While you're determining how to enlarge your house, you might invest in a narrower dining table, that will seat the same number of people but take less space. Using the space you have more efficiently will at least make you more comfortable while you are planning.