Diary of a Shed - 10 July 2004 < Back    Next >    HOME
More work was done on the 8th and 10th of July, with a gap for rain between those days. As you can see from these pictures the roof is coming along very nicely, and I haven't fallen off and died, not even once! On the 8th I added the two boards on the front-left of the roof, and on the 10th just one more, the one on the back section facing forward.

That last one was a bit of a tricky one to do. If you'll look back to how I've been doing this you'll see that I use two roof hooks (you can see them still attached in the full-view photos), lift the boards up and drop them on, then push them to the top of the roof. Unfortunately this particular board has only half the available bottom edge, so I had to be very careful with it. It was determined to tip off to the left, so I had to move it across and put it on at an angle, and then because of that it wanted to slide off down the roof as well! With a bit of grunt work I finally managed to get it in position and it now fits quite well. There is just a little corner which needs to be sawed off (bottom-right of the board) where it meets the valley rafter (the diagonal rafter going from corner to corner). That is the last full board to go on, so now I'll have fun with measuring and messing about with bits of odd-shaped board everywhere. Hopefully I'll be able to do it so that these pieces are quite light and easy to manoeuvre.

Another plus point is that when it rains it only gets the floor wet in the middle now - both ends are completely dry... unless there's a downpour, in which case it runs around of course. When the roof is covered I'm looking forward to maybe storing things in there at last - possibly I'll move down the rest of the wood, which will make up the ceiling joists.

While I remember (have I said this before?) the ceiling joists are going in last so that I can have easy access to the roof, at least while I'm still boarding it up. I've put joists in the front section and it was a real pain to get the ladder between them and (more importantly) squeeze myself up through as well. Hopefully the walls won't spread apart TOO much by the time I attach them. If they do, well, never mind!


A bit of a technical problem here: The plan was to have one side of the roof poking up so that the other side rested underneath it (and have no gap), but I soon realised that that only works if your two boards meet at 90 degrees. Anything else and you either have a gap like this, or when you do the overlap it makes it necessary to plane the edge to the correct angle. I didn't want to overlap it so that it needed planing - these boards are 8ft x 4ft and I didn't fancy doing that at such a great height (and once it's up it ain't coming down!). Anyway, it's up there now and this is the problem I have!

Before I put the felt on I need some filler just to run down the gap, and make it flat on top. Before I go and buy the wrong stuff, I need to work out the best thing to use. It needs to be flexible so it will stretch with the weather and not crumble or otherwise disintegrate, but also fairly hard-wearing. This is probably the most vulnerable part of the roof so I need to get it right - I can't leave it like it is because the rough edges will probably end up doing nasty things to the felt. No doubt future updates will resolve this so stay tuned!

Back

01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09