I have a 2-car attached garage but three cars in the household. While I'm obviously aware I can just leave the third car in the driveway, it inconveniently blocks the cars in the garage and in the winter it gets covered in snow.
I'd like to make a parking space on the side of my garage (most likely with pavers or concrete) but I'd also like to be able to put a roof over this space to keep the snow off.
If I do get a concrete slab poured, I could have them place some 4×4 post bases (like this or this, I'd imagine) to use on the one side, and then I think I'd have to install some kind of ledger board on the side of the garage and then of course build a simple slanted roof between the ledger board on the garage and the board running across the 4x4s on the other side.
Here's a picture of the side of the garage, and a terrible sketch of my 4×4 posts and my ledger boards (I'd probably use 3 posts, not 2, but the drawing was bad enough already…)
I'm not sure exactly what that would entail or if it's a bad idea to try to put a ledger board on the side of my garage- would I need to remove some of the vinyl siding, is that wall structurally supporting enough to handle the ledger board, etc.
If I couldn't put the ledger board directly on the garage itself, could I just put 4x4s on each side, slightly taller on the side near the garage?
Obviously this would all need to be approved by my town with a building permit, but I wanted to start planning this out and seeing what problems I might run into and how I should design this thing.
Best Answer
This is highly dubious since you mention snow. The current garage sidewall is not high enough to support the high side of a shed roof over your proposed additional space, and the additional roof (if you just slap it on there anyway) will introduce additional snow-loading to the garage roof that it's probably not designed for. You can get some massive snow drifts in that configuration.
You would do better to build a totally separate structure away from the current garage. Once again, given the mention of snow, that structure would probably better be a garage - aside from people blindly following trends from elsewhere-that-it-does-not-snow-in, carports have never been all that popular in snow country because the car still gets snow on, around, and under it anytime the wind blows, so it's barely better than parking it out in the open.