roof

After my recent learning experience on how to properly space cedar roofing shingles, I had gradually been reworking the roof.  Yesterday Chloe went to play at the neighbors’, so I had a big block of time to keep pounding away.

Installing these is tedious, but they really are beautiful.  I got everything done up to the ridgeline, so all I need to do is install some flashing on top to complete the job.

With many DIY projects, I know just enough to have an unjustified confidence and not enough to know that I’m screwing something up.  I had started installing the playhouse shingles based on my own recollections of how much exposure each shingle was supposed to get.  You have to keep in mind that I’ve never installed a cedar roof before, so these memories might have been based on something I read years ago.  Long enough ago that I had forgotten the important parts.

When I was about 1/3 of the way through the roof, I noticed that the back of the tag had some instructions that just had to be wrong, since they didn’t agree with what I was doing.  They said that each shingle should get no more than 5″ of exposure, but I was setting them with 7 1/2″.  Given that they are about 15-16″ long, that meant the difference between 2 layers and 3 layers.  Since I was careful about my seams and nail spacing, I convinced myself that it just wasn’t necessary to go so overkill on a playhouse.   And besides, who wants to spend more on cedar shingles than they absolutely have to?  The partial roof had already gone through several rains without incident, so I wasn’t too concerned.

Well after getting much more of the roof done today and checking on it after a rain, I now realize I screwed up.  While there are no active leaks, the problem is actually water soaking through the shingles, causing a bunch of them to look like the picture below.  I think this will eventually lead to real leaks, so my plan now is to start pulling up nails and resetting shingles at the correct 5″ spacing.  Not fun all all, but better to do it now than rip it apart or replace it later!

Soaked cedar

Q: what’s better than spending fathers day weekend working on a playhouse

A: nothing!

Birds' eye view

So here’s what was accomplished the last couple of weekends.  As always, it’s piecemeal…a few hours here, a couple there.  One of the design changes we’ve made since the “final” Sketchup design is to extend the front rafters out beyond the roof line.  Also, we switched to 2×8s for the front rafters to both give a more solid look, as well as to have extra depth to allow them to be notched around the lower beams.  Since you really can’t see any of the other rafters from the sides, they really do make the roofline look much more serious.

The cedar shingles look awesome, but they too are not very visible except along the front edge or if you choose to remove an upstairs screen and hang out the window to get a look at them.  With just a little more effort, the playhouse will be dry!   Of course, it’s taken me to the end of the rainy season, so that was bound to happen naturally, anyway

The first few shingles

The first of the larger, notched rafters in the front of the playhouse

The front rafters project out beyond the roofline

More shingles!

The roofers came out on Friday to rectify the punch list items. They missed several things, including the cracked ridge shingles that were my primary complaint. We probably have 30-40 like this, scattered along our ridge lines. I will have to call them again tomorrow, but this time I’m going to try to get the guy in charge to come out and look at these. Somewhere along the line the communication isn’t getting through, so I want to make sure that we get it finished right next time.

9/17 update: I got the main rep. from the roofing company to come up on the roof with me.  He completely agreed that the workmanship was shoddy and committed to getting it fully resolved.  Since we still haven’t paid them anything, I believe that they will.

Cracked shingles

They really cranked today.  The roof is basically done, minus some clean up tomorrow morning.  I went up to check everything out, and they did an amazing job of incorporating new flashing into our beat up old dormers.  And the appearance of the shingles is actually better than we expected.  Of course, the new roof is making our old paint look even worse, so you know what we’ll have to do soon…

New shingles

They showed up this morning, and by the time I got home tonight, the whole roof looked like this.  Very exciting!  At least we are telling ourselves that it’s exciting, so we can feel better about the large amount of money that we’re spending.  I think it would actually be much more exciting to have a roof that had 20 years left in it!

Felt-papered roof

Because without it, I might not have a good reason to tear open a section of our roof on Labor Day. We are getting a new roof started the day after, so we knew this was our only opportunity to repair the old tongue and groove boards that had rotted decades earlier. The previous owner had opted to go over them with plywood (which is great, except why not fix the damage first??), which I had to remove to get access to the bad boards. And of course there was no way that we’d consider doing this until just before we were getting a new roof installed.

Once I got the plywood off, it became apparent that instead of 3 rotten boards, we had 6. And actually we had more, as you can see in the photo, but the ones I left alone were only bad on the top. If the bottoms were solid and were still holding paint, I didn’t touch them. Since they are only decorative at this point and are shielded from weather, they’ll be fine. The “new” boards were from the old back porch ceiling (since incorporated into the kitchen), which I had dismantled and stored in the garage. To see them in their native setting, see this post. This was one of the first times that we’ve been able to take advantage of our stockpile. We did spend some money getting boards dipped & stripped, but it is worth it to get the lead paint removed. Since we needed more boards than expected, I had to use our Speedheater infrared paint remover to clear the paint from where I had to saw through the extra boards. I don’t like the idea of kicking out a bunch of lead paint dust, especially with kids around!

Damaged T&G boards

And without the boards

Repaired eaves

We got a new bid from a good contractor for $800 less than the first one.  Given that they could also start within a few days instead of close to a month, the choice was easy.  Because our other bids didn’t pan out (one guy never got back to us and the other bowed out because he worked by himself), we decided to just move forward instead of wasting more time.  It looks as though they’ll start the hanging within a day or two!

This weekend I cleared out all the tools and remaining materials so that they’d have space to work.  I also went ahead and cut a hole in our patio cover and added plywood to make a standing/walking surface.  My initial plan of gracefully removing the panel in order to be able to reinstall it did not pan out.  The nails wouldn’t budge, so plan B was to rip it to shreds.  They’ll have to start with the “fun” job of lifting bunches of sheets through the slot and feeding them into the back bedroom through the window hole.  And that’s after carrying them up our front stairs and all the way to the back of the house. An elevated lot is a major pain.

We removed the chimney to create space for a bigger pantry closet and a chase for heat ducts to the upstairs.  This was possible to do, because our new furnace and tankless water heater duct directly out the side of the house, making the chimney obsolete.  Our friend James pitched in once again to help take us take it down.  He worked like crazy with the cold chisel and sledgehammer, while Julio carted the bricks out to the backyard.  They were able to get the whole thing down in only 2 hours.  The old mortar helped a lot, as there wasn’t much holding the bricks together.