It’s a carport, it’s a porch — it’s the carporch
When the carport is the only place to sit in the shade, you dust off your chairs and make it work!
When we came to see our house for the first time, on a dreary February day, I took only one exterior photo: the pic below of the carport. Gardeners love to joke about how all their time in the garden is spent actively gardening rather than sitting still and savoring what they’ve created. For me, I don’t mind telling you, it’s all about my seat and my view.
That February day, amid all the more urgent considerations and negotiations, a piece of my brain was making note of the fact that the carport was the only bit of usable outdoor space. I don’t think we had even made it home before I started picturing a long table and benches in there, and began referring to it as “the patio,” even though I couldn’t yet imagine what kind of garden I’d wrap around it — or when. Every time I said “the patio,” as we packed up our old house and strategized about this one, my husband would look at me like I was loopy. There was no patio, and he couldn’t imagine how I meant to turn the carport into one.
I really can’t overemphasize that when we bought this house, the backyard was nothing but a small rectangle of grass off to one side, the rest of the “yard” being occupied by a detached two-car garage plus carport (together, roughly the same size as the house), with asphalt running right from the rear wall of the house to the front of the garage and around into the driveway. Literally not a tree; not a shrub; not a plant of any kind. Just asphalt, grass, chain link fence.
We are shade worshippers, the two of us, and the only slice of shade anywhere was beneath that carport roof.
Originally, we imagined adding a screened porch to the back of the little house, but that would have required funds we didn’t have, and meanwhile I needed somewhere to hang my beloved pod chairs. What we did do is convert half of the garage into a studio, and while they were at it, I had our beloved contractor tack up 1x8 boards around the back corner of the carport to semi-enclose the space and create some separation from the neighbors behind us. They also painted the raw ceiling white and put blocks between the rafters to hang the chairs from.
