From Carport to Crafts Room

For months I have been finding small pebbles on top of my late husband's car, when it has been parked ostensibly safely in my carport. Last September my friend Lee was looking around and noticed the pebbles. He recognized that they were part of the carport roof—not even from inside the ceiling, but from the top level of the roof itself. It was a flat roof topped with pebbles instead of shingles. The flat roof was itself buckling and raining debris.

So many of the joists were destroyed that it will be expensive to fix. Just to repair the carport roof would require some serious building, as a flat roof is no longer allowable under the building codes. Lee suggested that I could probably add actual walls and produce an actual room (!) for not that much more than it would cost to replace the carport roof. It looks, then, like the fantasy of adding a room—which Joel and I had discarded when I realized his financial situation would not permit it—may come true after all!

In this heat, I still want a canopy over my car, to reduce its turning into an oven during the summers. We could replace the carport by moving it forward to run even with the living room at the porch line.

Here is the house with the carport roof still in place. This photo was taken just as the sand pumping had been completed. A new layer of foundation has been added to bring the floor up to the level of the rest of the house.

Now, today, the scary part begins. Up to today, I had made my carport area unusable by my cars by adding the raised slab, but I had not yet completely committed myself and my bank account to replacement of my roof and construction of a new room. As of this afternoon, the old rotten joists lie on the ground, along with most of my shingles. The flat roof panels and pebbles have already been carted away except for the small section that covered the tiny laundry room and storage shed. What is left of the flat roof is covered only with a plastic tarp.
The next step will probably be new roof construction and basic framing of the crafts room. Alternatively, they will lay pilings for the new driveway. I did not want pilings under the driveway, but the engineer says that any downward settling of the driveway would pull my roof off, since the carport will be connected the rest of the roof.
I am not accustomed to making large or long-term financial commitments such as this. It is scary!