About a month into the construction of the roof, it’s still not complete… but it’s coming along, and looking awesome. I’ve been frustrated lately with how little time I’ve been able to spend working on the house. I’ve been out of town a lot, first for Thanksgiving, and then to attend a cheesemaking course at a nearby university. While out of town my laptop (among other things) was stolen, which means I’ve lost thousands of photos, including the vast majority of the photos from this building project. And then I came down with strep throat…and jury duty. Day after day of jury duty, which still isn’t over…and as I sit in deliberation with eleven other people in an overheated room, my EPDM pond liner sits patiently on a pallet by the cob house.
All my complaints aside, a lot of work on the roof has happened, mostly due to my friends Greg and Steve. I’m forever indebted to them both, because they’ve each spent a lot of time here lately, working on giving my house a sexy, sexy hat.
The first step, after raising the ridge beam, was placing all the roundwood rafters. They’re all tulip poplar, harvested from our woods, and each one was notched by Greg where it attached to the ridge beam. They’re long enough for a 2.5 to 3 foot overhang, except on the west side of the house where there’s a 4 1/2 foot overhang!
Once all the rafters were in place, we started with the decking. The sawmill cut some 3/8″ by 10″ boards for us, which are thin enough to bend a little with the curves of the roofline. The decking is attached directly to the rafters, and will be exposed in the interior of the house, as the ceiling in the second story. Each piece of decking had to be custom cut, and we spent a lot of time making trapezoids.
The next job was attaching all the fascia, which are the boards that’ll hold in all the soil for the living roof. We used pine and cedar milling scraps that were flat on one side and rounded on the other. The boards varied a lot in shape, width, and thickness, which made it really fun for Greg as he custom cut each piece.
fascia and 4.5' overhang
After all the decking and fascia were up, Steve put a layer of rigid blue foam insulation over the decking. They’re scrap pieces from the Habitat work site dumpster, all odd shapes and sizes, pieced together with duct tape into a strangely beautiful blue board quilt. I’m totally bummed that I lost all my pictures of this part of the project… But I do have some pictures of the way Steve got the blue board up onto the roof, which was by throwing each piece as if it were a frisbee…
I had an old pool liner that I got for free, but it came with its fair share of teeny pinholes. So I broke down and bought a new EPDM pond liner, which cost me $400! Eeek! We put the used pool liner over the blue board layer, mainly to keep the insulation from blowing away until we can get the EPDM up onto the roof. The pond liner weighs between 250 and 300 pounds, so it’ll take the effort of a few people to get it up the scaffolding and onto the roof. Hopefully that’ll happen sometime in the next few days!
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earthen acres 