The Roof

As I said in my last post, we went ahead and hired someone to apply the OSB roof sheathing for us. While he was at it, we also had him do the fascia board and soffit vents.

The south face of the roof addition was a cinch and took about two hours to sheath and it looked great. The seams between original house and addition were, well...Seamless. Everything lined up beautifully.



The north face of the addition...Well it was the polar opposite (no pun intended) of the south face. Nothing but trouble, headache, extra work and much grumbling. I think I already mentioned that when the concrete guys poured the foundation, the north east corner ended up about 1.5 inches lower than the rest of the slab. The change is very gradual and doesn't show up well on a 4 foot level, but its there. It's most obvious when you look at the wall as it doesn't line up properly with the existing house.

If I'd ever built a house before (or an addition) I may have known and had the foresight to frame that particular wall using longer studs, cut to the appropriate length. Doing that would have made the wall line up properly. But I didn't, and the result is that when we put the trusses in, the trusses also did not perfectly line up vertically with the old roof pitch, etc.

And so it goes, the guy I hired to do the roof sheathing all of a sudden had to spend time removing the hurricane ties, jacking up the trusses, shimming between the truss and the wall top plate with 2x6 wood, re-nailing (I hope...guess I need to double check) and re-attaching the hurricane ties. The end result was a much improved roof line that matches with the existing house.

Mission complete - Roof sheathing done, and we checked fascia and soffit vents off the list too!





Over the weekend, we decided to put in the new door. There was already a door there from the previous owner's crappy bathroom addition, and upon inspection, we found that when they put in the door, they never put a lintel in place to hold the weight of the house above from collapsing down into the doorway!! Go figure! This is soooo unsafe. Thank god the wall held up! It showed obvious cracking where the blocks were settling/sinking at the top of the opening.

So before we could put in the new door, we had to put in a steel lintel. I enlisted the help of Maurice (the same guy I used for the roof sheathing). Between the two of us, we got the lintel in place and the door hung. It looks out of place in the dingy, under construction bathroom, but I really needed the opening properly sized so I can fur out the wall.



We also spent a good chunk of the weekend checking the roof sheathing nailing to make sure everything was extra secure. I used a long 2x4 to hit the boards from underneath to make sure everything was nailed, then marked boards that needed nailing. I then got up on the roof and marked nails that needed replacing while Jason located and tapped up nails that had missed the trusses. We removed as many missed nails as we could find to make the job look nice and clean, then drove nails into all the spots I previously marked.

The rest of the day was spent cutting the holes for the two tubular skylights, the bathroom vent, plumbing vent and marking the spots for the new dormer vent and turbine. I also spend a couple hours figuring out how to best bring the plumbing vents up into the attic and out through the top of the roof. I managed to glue the main intersection together and secure the 3 inch pipe going through the roof.

Monday morning at 7:15am, the roofing crew arrived. I had just made it out to the kitchen when the doorbell rang. I went out and greeted the project manager, and with that, his guys set loose on the house spreading tarps and getting prepped. The had originally told me the job would take them two days. But with rain in the forecast for Monday at 4:00pm, they wanted everything done ASAP! So instead of their regular 4 man crew, they had 9 guys working! They were up on the roof at at work before the sun was even fully in the sky.



The crew had the old two layers of shingles completely stripped in less than two hours. They had one guy running around the whole time marking decking (1x6 boards) that were damaged and needed to be replaced. Another guy followed him around and cut out bad board (and some were VERY bad...my foot went right through the roof in one place) and another guy running around replacing open spots with fresh 1x6. All in all, they replaced about 130 linear feet of 1x6 decking and about 20 feet of 1x8 ship lap which is what the house has in the porch and eave areas.




I went around and set the flashings for the various roof penetrations in place and mostly just watched. It was quite interesting and very exciting! The flatbed/conveyor truck arrived and the driver and his help began unloading everything onto the roof.






The end result is a vast improvement over the old white 3-tab shingles with the ugly clay tile ridge. And the seam between the addition and the house is completely smooth and unremarkable. Once we cover up the wood wall sheathing with brick, I doubt anyone will be able to tell by mere sight that there was a 12 foot wide addition built onto the side of the house.





The week/weekend, I hope complete all interior framing (shower, fur out block wall, bathtub area), finish the plumbing vent connections in the attic area, put in the window and get a layer of tar paper up on the exterior of the walls. We'll see!

Over-Framing and Truss Completion

I'm quickly learning that everything takes longer than anticipated. That said, things are progressing nicely!

Somewhere in between the New Years Eve party and sleeping in the next day, we did manage to finish putting up the trusses. We spent the following weekend scabbing on foot foot pieces of 2x6 to the ends of each truss to create a nice eave and match the rest of the house. Cutting the birds eye "notch" in each board wasn't too bad after doing a few with the circular saw. The real challenge were the board for the two corners. I had to make two for each corner to effectively "sandwich" the truss. This wouldn't be so bad, except that I used a special Simpson hurricane tie made for a 90 degree corner, so in addition to the birds eye, each board had to be notched in order to slide over the top of the hurricane tie.



What a pain in the ass! Betting there is a much better way to do this. Either way, its now done and we have eaves all the way around.

This past weekend, we tackled "over framing" the roof of the existing house. This is more commonly referred to as "valley framing," but I'm not sure that terminology applies here since we didn't frame any valleys, and instead extended the line of the roof on the house out to where the trusses begin. The end result *should* (please god) be that the roof will be one big long section with no obvious giveaways that we ever did an addition at all.

We started be stripping the shingles off of the section we intended to frame over. Once we were down to the wood substrate (1x6 redwood decking) placed two 2x6 boards along the inside of each hip and nailed them to each intersecting rafter. The purpose of the "spreader" board is to 1. give you something substantial to nail to, and 2. spread the weight of the rafters you attach to it (and the roofing above) along as much of the roof as possible.

We then cut a long 2x6 to length and ran it from the existing roof ridge to the ridge of the closest truss on the addition, tacking it to the board with a nail. That ridge board received four vertical supports which run down to the 2x6 we nailed down to the decking (with an existing rafter directly below it).



Once the ridge was nice and stable, we started cutting and attaching rafters from the ridge to the 2x6 boards we laid down along the hip. We needed a compound cut for each rafter, which is where two angles (other than 90 degrees) come into play in one cut. In this case, it was something close to a 150 degree cut with an 18 degree cut on the side. Since I had 14 of these to do, and my miter saw adjust to the extreme angle I needed, I figured out the angles I needed for the cut, then made a jig so I could easily and accurately make the required cuts. I don't have a picture of the jig, but it was just a few scraps of 2x wood screwed to a scrap of OSB in a configuration that worked.



Since we are over framing with 2x4 wood (mainly to keep the weight down) we also put some spreader boards down so we could run vertical supports to the longer rafters. Once they were all in place, I nailed in some lateral supports and began worrying about how to get the OSB up and nailed to the roof.

I always figured sheathing the roof would be hard work, but that I would cross that bridge when it was time. Well - It is time! Now, I've been doing the work up on the roof, and part of what took me so long was my fear of heights. I hate hate HATE climbing down ladders, and this project has been no exception. I also don't do well when I have to get close to the edge of a roof. Well, there have been plenty of times I've had to get right up to the edge to get stuff done. Between my fear of height and my partners arthritis, the two of us make a piss poor roof sheathing team.

So while we're eating lunch on Sunday, fretting about how to get the roof sheathing done, my dad stops by. I share our concern with him and he suggests I hire "Maurice" who is a guy he has used for years to do all kinds of work at his house, office, etc. I asked Maurice to stop by and he said he would do all the sheathing and for a very reasonable price (25% of what the roofing company wanted) since I'm supplying the materials. He'll be by on Wednesday to get it done.

Hurray! We can't wait to have a roof and get started on the inside!