History of Sunrooms

The outdoors has long been a way for families, friends and neighbors to enjoy getting together. Whether it’s relaxing on the front “stoop”, rocking on the porch, or lounging on the back patio… it’s always nice to get out of the house. Unfortunately, the challenges of wind, rain and bugs has frequently spoiled the outdoors atmosphere. So homeowners years ago began to look for other ways to enjoy the beauty of the outdoors with indoor comfort.

The history of sunrooms began with screened-in porches, some with removable windows for the cold weather season. While this solved the problems of bugs, birds, and leaves, the challenge with screened porches was keeping the inside clean of dirt and pollen. After awhile, someone thought of mulling storm windows together. In solving the dirt and pollen problem, it presented challenges of not just looking like an “add-on” to the home.

in the 1960’s, the patio enclosure was first marketed, meeting the needs of the thousands of single family post World War II suburban homes.  Because families found so many uses and so much enjoyment from these enclosures, this soon developed a market demand for better looking, higher quality, and well engineered enclosures.

Craft-Bilt has been a leading manufacturer of quality products for home improvement since 1946 - and so it was a simple expansion for them to start manufacturing engineered roof panels designed especially for use in patio enclosures, Florida rooms, patio covers and enclosed porches.  Lightweight and strong, Craft-Bilt’s panels were sold to home improvement companies under the trademark “Panel Craft®” beginning in 1962.  

In 1986, Craft-Bilt's engineers designed a complete sliding glass wall system and along with their existing roof system introduced Betterliving® patio rooms. This breakthrough product line created fully engineered, high quality three season patio rooms - all fully warranted. As well, this product line was made available to the public only through trained, authorized and exclusive dealers.

As Betterliving continued to meet this demand, we added additional products including, insulated glass, and then developed our four season vinyl sunroom.  All Betterliving patio room and sun room components are quality controlled and tested in our engineering laboratory - so they meet or exceed the structural requirements of local and national building codes.

Through the last 20+ years, Betterliving has become a national sunroom leader, and well-known by word of mouth from tens of thousand installations. Craft-Bilt Manufacturing Company works constantly to improve the design performance and structural properties of our Betterliving sunroom components.  We offer a 50 year non-prorated, transferable manufacturer’s warranty on all Betterliving Patio and Sunrooms.