shingles

I had a little time over the weekend to start working on the shingles for the back wall. It’s the type of project that I visualize as being very quick and easy, but of course, it’s not. On every row I was reminded of every non-plumb surface on our house and had to deal with the almost-but-not-quite-right angles of cedar shingles. It should look great once it’s all painted, although it’s taking me a bit of time to get used having siding back there, having shingles instead of lap and having the corner trim, which is a new detail we had to add to be able to cleanly mate up the disparate siding materials.

Normally I like shingle courses spaced a little tighter, but having them larger is not only saving us a ton of $$, but it also sort of mirrors the unusually large exposure of our lap siding on the rest of the house. Lastly, the 11″ spacing was the only way I could work out to keep each electrical box within a single course. I didn’t want to have to put in the big pieces of wood that often surround lights and switches on newer houses. In the same spirit as removing all the conduit and sinking everything into the wall, I’m trying to make it all look less cluttered.

Looking like a real house now...

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

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