Greetings,

My wife and I are relocating (from Texas) to Central NJ (Morris County)
and have elected to build our home.

One of the things that we have noticed in our search of the area is the
presence of rooms referred to as "Conservatories". They seem to be
rather prevalent in the area. When I asked my builder (16 new home
neighborhood), she indicated that roughly 2/3 of the new builds in the
development were electing to add the Conservatory. This is not
something that we see very much of here in Texas therefore it was
somewhat new to us. Additionally, it seems to be a room that will have
marginal utility (based upon our lack of experience with it).

The questions we have a

A) Is this an option that we should go ahead and do since it seems
fairly popular in the area?

B) Will NOT building a Conservatory cause us to be sorry later (i.e.
negative impact on resale, loss of a truly valuable room, etc.)?

C) Is it worth the return (i.e. cost to build relative to the value it
adds to the house)?

One of the things that we are considering is adding a closet and full
bathroom off of the Conservatory (if we elect to build) so that it
could conceivably be used as another (first floor) bedroom. Also, if
you finish the basement, you do get the additionnal "square footage" of
the Conservatory added to basement footprint (which could be used to
build out a media room, office or exercise room, etc.). We are
finishing our basement and are in the final "selections" process. Given
the seeming endless dollars that we have spent on upgrades already
(many of which we followed advice from a previous thread from this
group), the Conservatory is "up in the air".

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. Thanks. - Lee