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preferring galvanized roofing
Tuesday, September 29 2009
It was a gloomy day but not especially rainy, so I could continue with my outhouse project. Penny and David came over at some point to pick up a cat carrier (they're fostering a couple cats down in the City and seem poised to adopt one of them full-time). While they were here Penny asked to see the greenhouse, so I gave a tour. She really liked the outhouse, whose simple naked structure made for a series of eye-pleasing right angles and lines. When she asked what it was, I said "composting bin." I don't want to reveal what it really is until it's perfect. Down in the greenhouse, both Penny and David were amazed by the well, a 120 gallon excavation into bedrock. "You have a lot of time on your hands," David observed.
The roof I'm building for the outhouse is small - measuring less than 30 square feet. So when I was in Home Depot today buying such staples of my roof-building projects as hurricane clips, I looked around for some quirky unexpected material I might use for roofing. In the end I bought a unit of asphalt roll roofing, the material that is like that of asphalt shingles, but in featureless rolls about three feet by 33 feet.
Much of what I know about roofing materials is stuff I learned watching the various kinds age over the years back on the farm in Staunton, Virginia. In 1976 when my family moved to that farm, most of the outbuildings were roofed with that rolled roofing material. I remember its tendency to leak, all the repairs it demanded, and how, in the end, all of it was either demolished or re-roofed with other materials. Admittedly, that roll roofing had been installed by previous owners and we couldn't be sure how old it was, but I still can't help thinking of it as inferior material. Indeed, asphalt shingles themselves are of such similar material that I don't entirely trust them either, preferring to use galvanized steel where possible. That was the lesson of my childhood; aside from a few repairs made to the barn with roll roofing, we always used either aluminum or galvanized steel, and all the roofs we installed with that material have been maintenance-free ever since. But the problem with galvanized steel is that it only really comes in two widths: two feet or three feet, and the outhouse roof was going to be five feet, the next prime number up. I could have gone for the fully-corrugated roofing, but in the Home Depot, that stuff was all high up on a shelf and I didn't feel like asking someone to fetch it for me with a fork lift. So I bought the roll roofing. I figured most of it would be covered by the Purple Martin house anyway.
But then later, as I was assembling the roof itself, I realized that roll roofing isn't really compatible with gutters, and part of what I wanted to do was collect rain water so my outhouse would have a functioning sink.
Unlike in previous projects, I assembled the roof framework entirely on the ground. First I made four simple trusses, each composed of two rafters meeting in an obtuse angle to provide a pair of twenty degree slopes. I strengthened the joint between the rafters with glue and pieces of plywood, though I made no provisions for a roof pole (partly because the roof ridge would be the site of a stout vertical pole to support the Purple Martin house). Then I connected all the rafters together with two facia boards from which I'd ripped off the corners so as to continue the 20 degree slopes of the rafters. Usually when I make roofs, I make shed roofs and I cut the ends of the rafters perpendicular to their slope. But this time I'd cut off the rafters to make their ends plumb, so this required ripping the fascia boards. My bandsaw is good for some cuts, but it pretty much choked when I went to cut an angled rip, so I ended up having to use a power planer, filling the shop with all kinds of detritus that I'll have to clean up some day.
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