Up on the Roof

We've made a strategic decision about the roof, which is that we want it to limp through another several years so that we can afford to do the rear addition we'd like at the same time that the entire structure of the roof is replaced. Otherwise, see, we'd be replacing the roof structure, then a few years later tearing that down and putting on the addition.

Which means we have some holes to patch before the rain starts in earnest this year (we had a couple rainy days and it's projected to be clear as far ahead as the forecast goes).

Today Noel climbed up on the roof to deal with this little mess:

Basically, wind had lifted the shingles and revealed the really, really old roof underneath (keeping in mind that the current roof was put on in 1962, so the bad shingles under there are shingles that were old then).

Fixing this sort of thing is not that complicated: you just sort of re-roof the area that has been ripped open.

Our bigger task, when we have more shingles (these were leftovers from the chicken house), is to pull a lot of old vents and chimneys from the roof and cover those holes. For whatever reason, previous owners have just sort of left disused pipes all over the place, rather than remove them and reshingle in their place.

The other task we got done today was all about the back edge of the roof:

Noel climbed up there and sistered some new wood against the rotten rafters, the better to support the roof. But of course the deck of the roof had also rotted away, so it still sagged between the new boards.

So he slid some pieces of cementitious siding up there to hold the roof up. Kind of a hack, but it worked pretty well.

You can see on the edge of the roof here that there're many layers of shingles there. It's kind of ridiculous, actually, the number of layers of shingles we have on our roof (more than seven in places where we've counted).

Slips of siding is not a really good long-term way of supporting your roof, but it works pretty well here, and we really needed to use something that would not just sort of rot away.

Here's a piece of the old roof deck. It had rotted away, basically, so the shingles had to support themselves.

As Noel worked his way across, he added another sistered rafter. It's all about reaching up into the roof and nailing it in place, with all the yucky stuff up there adding to the ambiance.

We have a couple more weekends worth of work on the roof to get it ready for winter, but nothing we do is going to make it any more leaky than it already is, so we're not too worried about timing.

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posted by ayse on 10/12/08