Back in Ordnung!

So now I’ll go back to regular chronological order (or ordnung for us Germans).  Starting at day 14 it was time to put the subfacias up.  These are the boards that go around the roof on the end of the rafters.  Later on they’ll be covered by the batter boards for the internal gutters and a finishing facia of Hardiplank. Since doing it from the outside like most people would do involved me getting up 20 plus feet in the air on a ladder while balancing a long board, I decided to try to do it from the inside.  Also, since I had banned Princess from ladders, I needed to make a couple of jigs to hold the board on the end of the rafters while I nailed it.  So I came up with this:

With the ladder on the inside of the house and leaning out just a little way out I was able to get all of the subfacias up in the next couple of days. One of the harder parts was where the square bathroom meets the round part of the house.  Some cutting was required. It ended up being a complex angle, my favorite kind.

Next was to put up the last rafters, which are called jack rafters.  They weren’t too terribly heavy, and with a stepladder and some help from my clamp friends we soon had them all up.

This is also a good picture of my second best friend, the palm nailer.  I have the Ridgid one, it has worked well for the last 10 years.  https://www.amazon.com/Ridgid-Palm-Nailer-Metal-Housing/dp/B01JUTYQ5G/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1534961634&sr=8-2&keywords=ridgid+palm+nailer Not only are they about the only way to nail hurricane straps but are also good for saving the arm during general nailing.

Next was to nail the hurricane straps.  Deltec had sent 3 big coils of 18 gauge 304 stainless steel.  At each panel joint the strap goes on both sides all the way from the floor to over the top of the wall sill plate.  This was heavy duty stuff, I ended up having to cut it with a cutoff wheel on the grinder.  Also on each joint were 4 metal joining plates by Simpson, again 304 stainless.  To top it all off 20d stainless nails were driven in at about 1 foot on center.  They were too big for the palm nailer so I wore out my arm one day driving them in.  I had asked Deltec to substitute as much hardware as they could with stainless.  It added about $6k to the cost of the house, but with the salt spray we have it made me feel better.  I ran out of the smaller SS nails for the hurricane straps so I just tacked them on and later on brought more nails out and finished the job.  Each one has a lot of nails, every hole filled in the header beam and 4 inches on center after that.

Next was to fit the upside down joist hangers over the top of each rafter and nail them to the head beam.  Deltec says not to toenail the rafters to the sill plate, they want the roof to be able to move a little bit.  These joist hangers were one of the few metal bits that were not SS, they were instead lightly galvanized.  6 months later they were showing corrosion.  I ended up spraying them with cold galvanizing compound to protect them.  When we do manage to get the soffits up and slow down some of the airflow it should help with that.

The next thing to do was to put the plywood roof decking up.  These 1/2 inch thick panels were precut to fit and labeled.  When I was younger I would have simply attached them to a rope and pulled them straight up on the roof.  Being older and since it is so windy at our site, I made a long ramp, attached a clamp and a rope to each panel, and pulled them up the easy way.

Buttercup also thought I might fall off the roof at some point.  Since I had forgotten to bring an OSHA safety harness with us, I made one:

Then it was a 3 day slog of putting the panels in place.  Down here they use screws for these instead of nails.  I also decided to back it up with construction adhesive as well.  I actually have more faith in the glue than the screws if the big one comes.  It was a lot slower putting the screws in at 4 inches on center than using a nail gun, so it took a couple of days.

With the round part done it was time to figure out the hip/valley joint where the square part joins the round part.  Since I always avoid this whole problem by only building shed or gable ended roofs, I called my carpentry genius friend Cliff in to figure it out.  Within an hour or two he had made a couple of beautifully angled framing pieces to finish the frame.  I could of figured it out, but it would have taken me all day and a bunch of trips up and down the ladder.  Over the next day I put the roof panels on the square part up.  Lastly the 6 foot in diameter cupola to cover the hole in the center of the roof went up.  This is attached to the rafters through some very long timber screws going through the full width of the 2×6 cupola rafters.  I ended up cursing Deltec a lot at this point because it was very hard to get an acceptable pilot hole for these in the field.  I wish they had predrilled these for us, or at least told me a drill press would be handy!

I decided to go shoeless while on the roof during this process.  Even though the roof is not that steep, it was steep enough that I was doing a fair amount of sliding around.  I ended up digging the top of my foot into the plywood a lot to stop the sliding.  After a couple of days the tops of my feet showed the toll:

With the roof decking up it was time to take the weight off the jig pole and see if the roof was going to fall in or not.  So I went to the base of the jig and started turning the screw to loosen the jig, THE WRONG WAY!  A little bit of puzzlement followed, lefty loosey righty tighty all that stuff.  Finally figuring it out, this time I labeled the base of the jig with arrows.  Down, Up! I lowered the jig and thankfully no ominous creaking and nothing moved.  We left it up for now, as we had to go back to work for a few months.  This was Build Day 24.