Friday, October 15, 2010

I'm out of half and half so I'm drinking a damn latte


When people ask me what I'm doing to do on vacation, I usually say, "Some stuff around the house."

Sometimes, I say, "Work on the roof."

There are six sections of roofs and one section has six dormers which each has their own roof, so I have twelve separate roofs.

That roof above, used to be flat. Flat roofs suck, so I added a pitch to it but where I live you aren't supposed to change the roof line without a building permit so I pitched it just a little so the change cannot be seen from ground level.

My house is the highest so the neighbors cannot see the change either.

The pitch is 2" for every foot, which is the minimum pitch for a shingled roof even though most roofers will tell you that it needs to be steeper, at least 3" per foot; contrary to what the manufacturer says.



The roof above, is a nearly flat roof, in parts, which I had been patching since I got the house over ten years ago. The life span of a rolled roof is 5 to 15 years. Patching was getting to be too much so I tore up the roof, put down plywood and installed a rolled roof.

Rolled roofing is ugly and cheap and involves a lot of roofing adhesive. Nobody can see this roof, so I wasn't terribly careful with not getting the adhesive where it shouldn't be. I would rather have too much adhesive than not enough.



I hate flat roofs. I know sometimes they cannot be avoided but I had two dormers with flat roofs that were always giving me trouble. The first one is the one in the first picture and it is in a place where if I were to tumble off the roof, I would slid down a different roof fall a foot and a half and land on another roof.

The second flat roofed dormer was in a section that if I were to tumble off the roof, I would slide down a different roof, fall twenty feet to a different roof if I were lucky. If I were lucky the fall after the slide would be thirty feet.

I don't like hieghts so I have been putting off fixing this section properly until emptying the buckets under the leaks was too much.

There is absolutely no reason in the world why these two dormer had flat roofs other than the person that installed them was a jackass.



When it comes to construction related things, I'm not a jackass so everything had to go.

That's my shadow on the lawn.



With everything gone, I had more choices on what to do, so I pitched the roof at a greater angle than the other dormer. I would say that I pitched it at a ratio of 3" for every foot but I actually pitched it at 11" over 3.5 feet, which just cannot be seen from street level.



I hated the builder ever greater when I got to see inside of things, fortunately there wasn't too much rot from water damage.



I got the felt paper down before the rain came. Now I just need to get the shingles down.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just learned more about roofing than I ever thought possible.

"I would rather have too much adhesive than not enough."

I think this is true in several areas of life.