What Is A Carport?
Are you looking for a safe place to store your vehicle but don’t want the full on expense of a garage? Then what you want to look into is a carport. Don’t know what that is? That’s okay, because we’ll go over that in this article.
When you think about protecting your car from the elements, if you’re like most people, the first thing that springs to mind is going to be the garage. A garage is a great place for storing your vehicle: it is completely enclosed, you can lock them, many of them are attached directly to the house so you don’t have to deal with inclement weather when you have to go out.
However, unless you already own or are renting a house with a garage, you can pretty much say goodbye to the whole idea. While owning a house means you should be able to build a garage, this will not be an inexpensive project. You can do it yourself and safe a bit of money, but it will be a long project. Or you can hire a contractor to build it, but there will be quite a hefty bill to pay when all is said and done. And if you’re renting? Unless you want to move to another house, then you can forget all about it!
But a carport…
Indeed, a carport is basically a garage alternative, without the doors. Or the expense. Think of them as a roof with poles for support. If you’ve never seen one before, then take a look at the picture below for an idea of what they are.
Carport
They provide basic shelter for your car or truck in all but the most extreme conditions. Generally, unless it’s hailing and the winds are severe (as carports have open sides, hail damage is possible with very high, gusty winds, but pretty unlikely), you should never have any real problems. In fact, if all you’re looking for is to keep you car nice and shady, then a carport really is all you’ll ever need.
We mentioned that garages can be expensive. Well, carports, depending what options you go with and how you go about building them, can range from costly high (though nowhere near the price of a garage) to a do-it-yourself low. If you go with the do-it-yourself option, then you can find some decent, ready to build kits at a good price. You can even get some carport plans online and buy the materials separately and save even more money. Of course, you’ll have to either own or have access to tools and know how to use them, but we feel that tools are a good investment anyway and would be well worth adding to the budget if you don’t already own them.
No matter how you go about getting a carport, we think that once you’ve got one, you’ll be glad you did.
In additional posts, we will look into the advantages of a carport. We will cover some of the points we’ve made here, but will go into more detail on each one. We’ll also look at the disadvantages of a carport, because while carports are great, facing facts, they do have some downsides.