Lanai Screen Enclosure Company in Lakeland, FL

A screen room offers numerous benefits for homeowners in Central Florida:

At True Aluminum, we prioritize quality and customer satisfaction:

Our screen rooms and lanais can be tailored to various parts of your property:

We are one crew for the whole backyard. Along with enclosures we build pool cages and carports, handle gutter installation and paver installation, and do screen replacements on work other companies put up. Bundling them onto one permit and one schedule is cheaper than calling three contractors in three different months.

These three words get used interchangeably around here, and contractors are not always careful about it either. The distinction is worth knowing before you get quotes, because it changes the price by an order of magnitude.

A lanai is roofed and screened, and the roof is usually an extension of the house roofline. When the space sits under the existing truss line, builders call it an under truss lanai, and screening one in is the cheapest version of this job because the structure is already there. A screen room is the same idea, screened walls and an aluminum roof, but built as its own structure rather than tucked under the house roof. A Florida room, or sunroom, is glazed rather than screened: windows and doors instead of mesh, and sometimes conditioned air.

The practical test is what you want to keep out. Bugs and leaves, get a lanai or screen room. Rain blowing sideways and summer heat, you want glass, which means a sunroom.

Screening an existing covered patio or porch runs $10 to $24 per square foot in Florida, and a Central Florida contractor puts the typical finished patio or porch enclosure at $6,000 to $10,000. National cost data lands in the same band at $10 to $25 per square foot, which is unusual agreement and a good sign the number is real.

Building a new roofed lanai from scratch is a different job entirely. National figures for that run $50 to $175 per square foot, because you are paying for footings, posts, a slab, and a roof before a single screen goes in. For a 20 by 20 footprint, screening an existing covered space works out to roughly $4,000 to $10,000, while building the same 400 square feet new runs $20,000 to $70,000. A 10 by 20 porch screened in comes to about $2,000 to $5,000. If all you want is shade and you do not care about bugs, an aluminum pergola over the same footprint costs a fraction of that.

Those are general market ranges from public cost data and other contractors published pricing. They are not True Aluminum prices and they are not a quote. Call (863) 804-6021 and we will measure the space and give you a real number.

What moves it: whether there is already a roof and slab, the span between uprights, screen type, how many doors, and whether you want a kickplate or chair rail detail along the bottom. If the slab is cracked or undersized, that gets poured or set in pavers before any framing goes up, and it belongs in the budget. A permit for a new screened porch runs $200 to $500 nationally, and Lakeland publishes a schedule that puts an $8,000 screen room at about $106 in permit and plan review fees plus the state surcharge.

Yes, you need one. Polk County confirms that screening any space requiring structural or infill framing requires a permit, and that includes most of what people assume is a simple screen-in job.

The permit exists because the enclosure has to be engineered for wind. Florida Building Code sets a design wind speed by location, and the frame member sizes, post spacing, and anchoring all come out of that calculation. Inland Polk County designs to a lower speed than the Gulf coast, which is why an identical enclosure costs less here than in Sarasota. An engineer seals the drawing, the county reviews it, and an inspector signs off at the end.

Screening an existing covered structure and building a new one are handled differently. The first is generally a simpler review because the roof and footings already passed inspection. The second is new construction and gets reviewed as such. We pull the permit either way, and unincorporated Polk County, Lakeland, Plant City, and Winter Haven each run their own fee schedule, so the number changes across the county line.

Every page you will read on this topic lists benefits only. Here is the other side, because you should hear it from a contractor rather than after the fact.

The screen is a consumable. Florida sun and storm debris wear it out, and you will be paying for rescreening periodically for as long as you own the house. Screens also need rinsing, and pollen season here is genuinely bad. A screened space loses some light compared to open sky, and solar mesh, which is the right choice for west-facing sides, cuts more. The structure takes up backyard, and on a small lot that is a real decision. Finally, a lanai does not stop wind-driven rain the way glass does, so furniture on the windward side still gets wet.

What we do about it: specify heavier mesh where pets or traffic warrant it, put solar screen only on the sides that need it so the rest stays bright, and size the enclosure against the yard you actually use rather than the biggest one that fits. If the tradeoffs point at glass instead, we build sunrooms too, and we will say so.

Most of our work sits within about an hour of the Plant City shop, and the jobs look different by area. Older Lakeland neighborhoods tend to be existing under truss spaces getting screened in and rescreened. Newer construction around Winter Haven and Davenport is more often a new screen room off a covered patio, with the slab already poured. Plant City runs to larger lots and freestanding structures.

Ask to see photos from a build near you at the estimate. Seeing the frame color and the mesh in daylight settles more questions than a brochure will.

We proudly offer our services to homeowners in:

Call True Aluminum at (863) 804-6021 for a free consultation and estimate. We will come measure, tell you what the space will take, and give you a number. Ask about financing while we are there.