Carport Conversions for Dummies

carport conversion framing

If you spend as much time wandering the back roads of the internet as the Antisocial Network researchers do, you know that there are some pretty darned cockamamie ideas floating around. We're not even talking about politics, gluten, vaccines, "healthy lifestyle," or any of the other topics that infest the web. Today, we're talking about the notion of converting your carport into living space; specifically of converting it into a sunroom. While the idea may be pretty strange, that pales alongside the treatment Tracie Harris gave it in the eHow.com article, "How to Convert a Carport Into a Sunroom."

For her third DotD award, Harris sampled the accumulated knowledge of a couple of bloggers (this was apparently before DMS required that contributors' references be "knowledgeable" about the topic). Tracie's post is... well, it could be the poster child for needing authoritative references, not least because Harris had already proven that she knows very little about construction or tools.

After our first read-through, we couldn't tell whether Harris even knows what a carport is. She reworded this information from one of those blogs:

"Carports are wonderful candidates to be turned into living space. They already have a roof and flooring. Often they have direct access to the house (so you don't have to cut a door) and are wired for electricity. Transforming a carport into a sunroom can be surprisingly easy..." In actuality, her source said that "You probably have an electrical line easy to access. Utilities are also most often easy to access." We don't think that having access to utilities is the same as being "wired for electricity," ourselves. But hey: unlike Tracie, we don't have the B.A. in History required to understand residential electrical needs!

Whatever. Moving on, here's some of what Harris tells the audience to do:

• "Drill 2-by-4s around the carport where you will be installing the new walls. Do the same under the rafters to provide support for the top of the windows." – WTF does that even mean? "Drill" 2-by-4s? "[U]nder the rafters"? As near as we can tell, this is Tracie's version of "frame the walls."
• "Place small L-shaped brackets every 6 inches or so along the bottom of the windows. Drill into both the window and the support beam. Repeat for the top of the windows. Repeat this on the exterior of the windows for extra security." – What windows? We have absolutely no idea what our moron is saying to do here! Oh, but we do see the DMS team's favorite lumber word: "beam."
• "Refinish the floor. The carport probably has a cement floor. You can easily stain it a dark color that will hide any stains from its previous life as a carport." – Idiot.

That's all, folks: nothing about framing, insulation, siding, drywall, HVAC, electrical connections, matching the floor height to the living space, weatherproofing, lighting... In other words, to collect her fifteen bucks our Dumbass of the Day just reworded a couple of sentences from some blogger's website and went on her merry way.

Perhaps the best part is that Harris thinks the only tools you need to build this marvelous sunroom are a drill and a measuring tape. Wow: that's helpful...

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