A poor man's house addition

We did a poor man's home addition. Well, sort of. The idea was to add covered space to our house for Chloe's upcoming 1st birthday party. We have a lot of guests to invite but we have a dinky little house. If her birthday was in a warmer season our guests can simply hangout in the backyard. But being in late November, we are destined to deal with unfavorable weather.

The options we have for her birthday party are:

(1) have it at some restaurant with the venue and food all taken care of. But this can be impersonal and expensive.

(2) rent an indoor space somewhere and bring in the food. Space rental is a big one-time charge. We will have to pay this money again next time we have another party.

(3) have the party at our house and somehow increase covered space to enhance the comfort of our guests in case the weather doesn't cooperate.

We are opting for option 3. If we find a good solution to adding covered space for people to gather, we can reuse it every time we have any sort of party. Let's face it, just Chloe's birthdays itself will forever be during fringe weather season.

So we set out to look for a canopy to turn a portion of our abundant outdoor space into pseudo indoor space to shield people from the elements. At first we had in mind a temporary canopy to put up when we need it and take down when we don't. But while shopping at Costco, Randy came upon this steel frame canopy meant for long term use. As you can see in the picture of the packaging, it is sturdy enough to use as a long term carport. It comes with heavy duty steel frame and coverage on all 4 sides in addition to the roof. This looked much more appealing than the temporary ones with aluminum frame and no "walls". Our area can get really windy so the 4 walls will be useful to block out the wind. This seemed like the perfect solution for our needs.


The only thing we had to consider was the rather permanent nature of this addition. Do we want this huge 10'x20' structure to be added to our backyard on a long term basis? How obtrusive will it be? How much natural lighting will it block off from our house? After some consideration, we decided to give it a try. We can always return it if it doesn't work out.

I am happy to report we do not plan on returning it. It turned out even better than we imagined. The design of the product is impeccable. We were more than amazed as we were assembling it. The ingenuity, the design, the quality, the ease of assembly all exceeded expectations. It's been up 3 days now and it is standing strong. It definitely fulfills all of our needs.

In addition, the dimensions of the canopy are so perfect it is as if it was custom made for our house. Because of it's perfect size, it does not feel nor look obtrusive at all. Since the roof is at a triangular slope, even though it butts up right next to our kitchen and bathroom windows, it still manages to funnel a good amount of sunlight into the house. Hence our concern of it blocking off natural lighting to our house is a non-concern.

On top of that, the cost of the canopy is a mere $200. $250 if you add the cement blocks we added to anchor it down. A $250 poor man's house addition. That's something worth blogging about.


Exterior view with awning closed.

Interior view from the garage.