Sunday, December 18, 2016

Gable-gable... trying to get the roof going before thanksgiving

We're catching up quick to real-time here on the blog. Once the fall really set in, it felt like a race to get as much buttoned-up as I could before the snows came. Next up was the roof, and I wanted to make sure the south side got up as soon as possible, as thats the side which was slightly tilted and accumulated water with each (rare) rainstorm (we're in the middle of a drought).

Keeping to the general theme of the larger terrestrial home that the treehouse hovers around, the roof design included a gable, centered on the front (west facing) entry wall. The ridge beam at the top of the gable would go from the curved wall to the front entry wall. Alas, getting everything set-up ended up with a few inches displacement for the apex, so i needed to double-up and offset the 2x6 ridge beam. The beam itself fell into a notch created by doubling up vertical 2x4's in both the curved and entry walls, then cutting away half of the inside edge of each of the these 2x4's down about 3 inches, creating a nice 2x notch for the ridge beam to fall into. Maybe more clear with photos... The rafters were spaced based on the needs of the polycarbonate roofing I was going to use. These were bird mouth notched where I could and screwed in / backed up with hardware where the rafters had to go flush with the ridge beam. Since I knew the roofing was going to be super light (corrugated polycarbonate 2-foot wide panels), I knew these didn't need to be overdone. But still needed to support potentially heavy snow-weight.

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