Skip to main content

Putting the roof on

How long could it take?

There's a stretch of good weather coming up, but I'm in California. It looks like it'll stay good into the following week. Let's try to put the roof on this weekend when I get back!

So I unpacked my work knapsack Friday night, and packed my cabin bag Saturday morning. Up at 6:00am. Chase and Katie joined us.

Saturday consistent of peeling off the tarp, hammering down any stray nails in the sheathing, laying the synfelt, and peeling the protective coating off of the metal panels. (We didn't notice when we took delivery the stickers that said "be sure to remove within 24 hours of delivery." They were a giant pain to peel off.)


Wow. A whole day and no metal on the roof.

Well, Sunday went better. We put up the two pieces of fascia trim that go on the west roof, and then laid down four of the main roof panels.


On Monday, we laid in two more full sheets, a half sheet to finish the west plane, fascia trim for the east side, another half sheet to start the east side, and two more full sheets. Wow, we're not getting much faster at this; we're sticking down about 100 square feet of metal per day. Well, we should be done Tuesday!

Things we've learned so far:

  • Sometimes you have to back the screws out and drive them back in to get the metal to snug flush to the sheathing.
  • We chose the fancy "Strata" roof profile, which has a narrow ridge to center the stitch screws on. We should have gone with the simpler "Delta" profile with its wider ridge.
  • Getting the spacing and butyl tape right to make a flat, nice looking seam was tricky. The key was to err on the side of too much overlap.
  • Our neighbor suggested using a multipurpose ladder as a roof scaffolding. There was no way we could walk directly on the 12:12 slope. We put a fair amount of foam pipe insulation on the ladder to protect the roof. Moving it around was still a hassle, but it worked pretty well from a safety standpoint.
On Tuesday, we had a couple hours' help from Calvin. We got the last four main panels on. I worked on fabricating the gable trim, and we got the three pieces of gable trim for the north side installed.

 

Okay, Wednesday is going to do the trick, right? Three pieces of gable trim for the south side went up before 10:30am.

Every so often we stop and look around and realize how gorgeous it is up here.


But for installing the ridge cap, we have a new problem: how will Eliot move across the roof? The folded ladder would rest on the ridge cap and damage it. We designed this little hobby horse that rests on the main panels, leaving a gap just big enough for the ridge cap:

 



He used the "chair" to scoot out from center to the edge the roof, caulking foam seal strip down to the main panels, then scoot back applying another layer of caulking to the top of the foam. The caulking was really stiff in the freezing weather! We brought it into the hotel to warm it up each night, and brought it to the work site in a styrofoam "cooler" to keep it warm.


Wow, getting that caulking and foam into place, with the complicated new locomotion system, was surprisingly difficult. And then, in the afternoon, it got a step harder when we took out the last roof anchor. It was about to be covered up by the final piece of ridge cap. Just one last piece of metal! We rigged up a big safety rope with a loop at the top to act as the harness anchor point. Lesson for next time:
  • We should have affixed a permanent roof anchor under the ridge cap for any future excursions onto the roof. I bought one at the hardware store, and I have it ready for next time.
So just five pieces of metal today, but with the very short days, the sun vanished behind the mountain in the 3 o'clock hour, and by 4:00, Eliot had just laid the the last caulking down. We plopped the ridge cap into place and screwed it down at each end. But it was just too dark to hang out on the roof to put the last couple dozen screws in.

So, here we are on Thursday morning, day 6 of our weekend roof install. Up at the cabin by 8:30am, and the last handful of screws takes about ten minutes to put in. Har de har har.








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It is DONE!

The final inspection was today. This guy is Levi, the county inspector, and as you can see, we passed! He only had two questions for me. One was about the energy efficiency credits and the blower door test, for which I had the compensating paperwork for the low-flow faucets already prepared. The second was asking for a smoke detector outside the bedroom; I pointed up and he saw that we already had one tucked into the alcove. And that was that! I got up at 5am to be certain I'd be here before the inspector, and I was ... by about five hours. In that time, I took another truckload of tool buckets down to the storage container, then picked up all the floor protection in the great room and vacuumed and mopped. It's glowing! Then I went back down to the storage container to get a hammer so I could glue in 32 wood plugs to cover the screws for the french doors. I fought with installing the screens, but the frames are too big! The manufacturer said "yeah we don't even make th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Odds and ends

I made progress on a bunch of little things today.  I painted a fencepost in 12" segments and pounded it in at the property line, where the outdoor camera can see it. Now we can measure the snow accumulation. I worked on finishing up almost-complete receptacle branch circuits. The first one I worked on was a little mystery: all the receptacles were installed, but the power didn't reach past a certain point in the line. After some investigation with a wire tracer and watching through the videos we took before covering the walls, I worked out what had happened: two receptacles shared a stud bay, facing into opposite rooms. The plan had been to bring power up to one box, jump over to the other box, and continue back down to the crawlspace to the next box. We forgot the jumper. I couldn't fish a wire between the boxes myself, so that repair waits. Upstairs, installing two receptacles completed the branch. The bathroom vent hole in the tile backer board was a skosh too small. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Energy efficiency testing

I came up after work to meet Brian, the contractor who is doing our blower door test: In this test, a big fan pumps air out of the house at a prescribed pressure differential, and then the air flow rate is measured in cubic feet per minute, then converted to whole house air changes per hour. The maximum limit is 5.0, and we scored that. Hooray! Brian said that we'd done a pretty solid job sealing the house, especially for an owner-built house; getting extremely tight seals requires careful awareness of the sealing challenges at every stage of construction. Another thing I learned by building a house. While I was up there, I got most of the way through installing a heat pump water heater to comply with energy efficiency requirements I re-discovered when looking up the blower door test requirements. This is all a bit silly. For our application -- a house occupied infrequently -- the on-demand heater is the best efficiency tradeoff, because it has zero standby waste. Unfortunately, th...
Post a Comment
Read more