Celebrating the Roof!

We are finished. I use the term "we" loosely. Mostly Tessie showed up to put in the last shingle and raise a glass to the end.

Nikki asked about roofing techniques. I am afraid that this one isn't the one to follow if you want pretty shingles, Nikki. There is more information on shingling back a ways. I think that it was on the basket shop or the book shop. I am going to have to sit down and organize the labels on here one of these days. I will look it up later.

I will try to give you all a few pointers, even though this is not meant to be a pretty roof. I used part of a bag of old cedar shingles that were stuffed in a drawer with the good ones. I never throw anything out. I am not even sure where they came from. They are ugly, warped and you can't help but lose a few in the cutting. They split easily.

Here's a couple of good tips for cutting them. I use a pair of regular shears that I reserve for woodcutting. I sharpen them regularly. They are good for when guess-timating weird angles.

This is a piece that I stained so that you could see the portion that I don't wish to save. This is the way to do it for the least splitting. Hold the scissors in your cutting hand and grasp the part of the shingle that you wish to keep in the other. I laid this against the roof to find the angle that I wanted to cut. Hold the shingle firmly and cut WITH the grain. In other words, start at the side of the shingle that runs parallel with the grain. Do not cut from the end of the shingle. That will split it every time. This holds true for all wooden shingles.

I cut them one at a time at the beginning and end of each row. That way each one is a custom fit.

Here is the first course(row) of shingles. If I were doing a regular house, there would be a thin piece of wood at the edge of the white posterboard, under the bottom edge, to make all of the courses lay at the same slant. In this case I wanted the bottom edge to lay flat since I wasn't at the edge of the roof.

If you were being serious.....You would draw parallel lines across the roof. I didn't want it to be perfectly serious, so I just went at it willy nilly. I did keep the same number of rows on all sides and tried to begin and end semi-evenly. None of the holes that I had to fill with shingles were the same. I had to trim a little here and there.It worked out in the end.

I think that I am going to leave them raw. Normally I would do a bit of staining to even them out. I kind of like the "patchwork" effect that they have the way they are.



As I said at the beginning, Tessie showed up for the ceremony of laying the last shingle. She then announced that she was going to stay up there and enjoy the view. She zapped herself a glass of Fruit Bat Punch and settled in.

I don't think that Zar was very happy about that. He wasn't worried about Tessie. He was just mad that she had stolen his drink and was calling it that ridiculous name. "Threatening her with your monkey wrench and throwing shingles at her is not helping, Zar!!! Cut that OUT!!!"

I am going somewhere that is not here for the rest of the morning. I will let them sort it out.

See you tomorrow!