Laying down the roof

(Joe here.) We laid the roof down in several stages. The first step was the plywood sheathing. Prior to that much care was taken to make sure that the two outermost rafters were square when laying up the rafters. Nick Jose, who did the excavation work, used his bucket excavator to help me lift all 45 sheets of plywood up onto the roof so I didn't have to get them up there one at a time manually. If you're in a situation like I was where I was working alone a lot, that kind of mechanical help is worth the money.

Also as Kyle mentioned we had a few sheets of plywood where I had to either trim off a half inch or so or add a sister to the rafter to ensure the end of the plywood would have something to tie to. Mea culpa. I did not take the time to make sure to straighten out any bowed rafters and make sure that the rafters were on 16" centers for their entire length. I ended up having to trim 3 sheets of plywood and put down 4 sisters. Out of 45 sheets of plywood I suppose that wasn't too bad.

The second step was to tarp the roof due to the immanent arrival of Hannah. Working with two 50 x 24 tarps on a day when a hurricane was blowing in was no picnic. Step three involved waiting for an appropriately windy day to take the tarps off so we could start laying the roofing felt. Step four was to move the sixteen 30' 2" L x 39' W sheets onto the roof. That used muscles I forgot I had!! The day we moved them onto the roof, we only took enough time to tack down each sheet with screws on every other rib, at the top, in the center and at the bottom. Step five was to complete putting in all of the balance of the screws. About 1200 of them. Step six involved finishing up the trim on the sides and the top edge.

Some comments about working with metal roofing. First, knee pads are your friends, good knee pads are even better. The ones I was using were adequate, but even now, two weeks after I finished my knees are still feeling the after effects. Second, make sure to use a good string line to mark for your screws if having them line up is important to you. Eyeballing a straight line doesn't work all that well. The three rows of screws we put in to tack down the panels wander around a little bit. And last, be careful about trying to use standard products in ways they aren't really designed for. We wanted a shed roof, and there really wasn't a standard product in the manufacturer's catalog that would work for a drip edge on the lower end, and a cover for the ends of the panels at the upper end. I ended up using hip edge which comes with a standard 145 degree angle in it. We needed it to be about an 80 degree angle to line up with the fascia boards. I tried to hand bend it to the correct angle, but ended up putting kinks in the manufactured bend that were difficult to work out when screwing it down to the fascia boards. Plus one piece blew off the roof and bent in the middle and I couldn't quite get that kink out of it. What we've done will work and keep water out from under the panels, but it could look better. What I finally figured out when I was done, was that some sort of bending jig would have been useful.

One very pleasant surprise was that the roof was square to within 1/4 inch on the two diagonals and the metal panels fit just right, without one side being too short or the other being too long.

Oh, and if you're the praying type? You'll get plenty of opportunities to pray while you're on your knees doing roofing.