After the hail storm i got online and ordered a carport from amazon. Something had to be done. I called a handyman i had used in the past and asked for a quote for the job. A quote was given and agreed upon and they let me know when they could come out and start. This particular handyman is a family operation. They’re good at what they do. They do good quality work that will stand the test of time. They just make me nervous when they problem solve because they usually problem solve differently than i would were i present in the situation. Case in point: the plumbing pipe run directly in front of the only electric outlet in the well house. I mean: laying across the front of it. So i usually wish to be there while they’re working so i can give my input if problem solving necessity arises. Thats why i ask for two weeks notice of when they can come so i can ask for a few days off from work to supervise the project. And they usually tell me what day they can come the day before that day. So of course, thats how it went. Once again, they did solid work. And once again, a problem solving necessity arose. They needed a container to mix cement. They didnt bring one. Well they found one in the home depot bucket i was using to hold rain water i had collected over the course of the last two years. Water that could be boiled in the event of an emergency, whereas the river water could not because there were contaminants from a fertilizer factory and other polluters upstream that seemed to give an awful lot of people health issues when they swam in the water (me included). (Not to mention in the past year the river actually did go completely dry due to drought) I dont swim in or drink that water anymore. Rain water in texas was invaluable. The ground water had sulfur in it. The river water had cancer causing chemicals. The rain water would just have bacteria growing in it if it was standing, and those could be boiled out. Well i came home the day they finished to find a beautiful carport, and an empty bucket that once held all my rain water. They had dumped it to mix concrete. I opened the well house door and stared. There were 5 bright orange shiny stacked home depot 3 gallon buckets; brand new. If they had asked, i would have directed them to these completely available empty home depot buckets. But they didnt ask. They problem solved the situation themselves and chose the bucket holding my rain water, which i was silently bitter about until we got a really big slow moving storm that dumped about a foot of water in our area over the course of a few hours overnight and filled up my rain collection buckets once more. By the time i emptied all the containers in the yard into the bucket they had emptied and the horse water container i bought years ago from tractor supply to store rain water, there was no room for any more rain water. So, the water has been replaced by nature and im no longer so bitter about it. At the time of the realization i just shrugged and said, well, if thats the worst thing that has gone wrong with this project im doing pretty okay. Theres always something that gets a little sideways when they problem solve without me and missing rain water is not that bad in the scheme of things when it comes to fixing the error. It could have been much worse.
It was a really cool notion that i had a protected place to put the car in the event of a hailstorm. I could park the car in the middle with one foot at the front of the car and two feet of space at the back of the car before the carport roof ended. There was about 2.5 ft of space on each side of the car.
They left me a pile of dirt they had removed from the holes while digging. Whenever it rained i would have to rebury some of the concrete cylinders at the top edges. The alternative was anchoring it into some railroad ties from the lumber yard one town over. I settled on concrete instead because i had lived in an apartment complex in san antonio where termites had infiltrated the railroad ties used to hold the dirt of the hills back when the apartments were cut into flatter lower elevated ground beside/beneath them. The termites were really eating those railroad ties into a situation of rot and collapse. My neighbor assured me they withstood the test of carpenter ants and would be there for decades to come but my experience in the apartment complex next to the airport in San Antonio stuck with me. I knew my neighbor closer to the river had regular termites, not the agricultural kind that cut grass into tiny pieces, like i had. I figured i’d just be inviting them further this direction. So i decided concrete was best. We’ve had several more hail storms, though none with baseball sized hail, and the carport has provided excellent peace of mind and protection for the car. This is good because the tree that protected it last time has very splotchy leaf coverage now considering half of it got knocked to the ground by twenty straight minutes of large hail.