Week 14: January 24 - 30

Week 14 and we're finally back to school after a nice long 5 week Christmas break. Getting right back into the sheds, and right now we're dealing with getting ledgers up underneath the rafter tails. We had a line snapped as a point of reference, measuring down from the top plate (") onto the sheathing. This is a reference point for the bottom of our ledger. Unfortunately, where we wanted our ledgers to lay, and where our rafter tails dropped down to, we were unable to use one or two pieces of wood for our ledger. So instead, we cut it into sections that fit inside of each rafter spacing. The ledger will be used to plant our soffit against.

In this picture you can see the bracing we used to hold the soffit material up while installing. Also a slightly better picture of the lookouts pinned to our rafter tails.

In this picture you can see the stops we anchored to the ends of the ladder. This was put in place so that we had something to firmly place the ends of our soffit material against to take an accurate measurement.

Here we snapped a line for reference, measuring up on the rafter tails to give us the point at which the lookouts needed to be set at.

Our soffit is in place. It was assembled in three parts: the smaller piece of wood to the left was installed first, pinning it to the rafter tails, but leaving the heads out so there would be more flexibility if adjustments needed to be made. The soffit vent strip was installed second, bringing the left lip up and over the first soffit strip and stapling the right lip to the undersides of the lookouts. Finally the third section of soffit was installed, placing it under the left vent strip lip and pinning it in place to the underside of the rafter tails.

Snapped a photo of the topside of the soffit assembly, before it is closed in and inaccessible.

Once the soffit assembly was in place, we had to focus on getting the outer ends of the soffit in level with the points anchored under the rafter tails. Because there was nothing to hold the ends in place, and the way the soffit was pinned to the rake rafter tail, the soffit has a propensity to curve upward. So, using a straight edge we ran that along the underside of the soffit towards the ends. This gave us a better visualization of what parts of the soffit needed to move up or down to bring the whole assembly into alignment.

Now that the front and back soffit are complete, we've moved onto the side assemblies. We're taking a 2x8 and cutting the left end at an angle, trying to get maximum coverage across the place where both points meet. After the back soffit is in place, the front soffit will be put in place, it's end overlapping the back soffit's edge.

We're also working on a mock up of a hip and valley roof system. Each person is assigned a section of the roof system and expected to measure, dimension and draw their own hip and valley rafters, and then install them in place. If one person's measurement is off, it can significantly alter the alignment of the entire roof system. Here I have a hip rafter in place, butting up against a common rafter which is anchored to the end of a ridge board. On the left side, a hip rafter from another's section is also installed.

A closer picture of the hip rafter meeting the ridge board.

And finally an above shot of the hip rafters from both sides, meeting the ridge board and the common rafter coming up between them. We did have some difficulty in the alignment process - both hip rafters were about an 1/8" short, which we had to take into account when setting these pieces up. The hip rafters come back further in this picture than they traditionally should.