Richie that is a good observation! It could be done, but we are not in a financial position to do it. The time to have done it was when my in-laws built the sunroom with the current train room underneath. When my wife’s grandparents had the house built in 1968, they had a sliding glass door off the dining area upstairs with a small deck. By the time my wife’s parents moved in, the deck was in bad shape, so they decided to build a sunroom in place of it where my ill father-in-law could sit, watch television, read a book, and watch the birds and squirrels in the trees. The first proposal was to just build a room with pillars holding it up. Instead, the builder built a regular slab with an unfinished room on the basement level. The exterior dimensions are 12 x 12, probably all they could afford for the project. They ended up putting the sliding glass door in the lower room (the current train room) which came into effect when designing the original Blackwater Canyon Line in the lower room.
It would have been so much better to make the room a little wider, putting a decent regular interior door into the new room, and then have the exit off that. That wasn’t their purpose at the time. They never used the back door. Long story short, we are stuck with it the way it is now. As is, I’m buying a little at a time to build even the small layout and using up any used lumber I can get my hands on to build this. We do what we can with the resources available. Thank you very much for throwing out the idea. All ideas are worthy of discussion!! Certainly many Forum members build additions or whole buildings for layouts, just like Mike G is building onto his garage right now.
I have some other thoughts on what we covered last evening I’ll put in a separate post.
