The Mini

While I was out taking pictures of the porch I took a picture of my Mini since some of my friends and family haven't seen it yet. So there it is.... it's Soooooo fun and I've been getting 30 MPG!

First of the doors are up.

Last night I put up two doors to see how they would look. I have to say that they look very nice indeed. All I had to do was put some 1x2 stripping on the inside of the frame and screw the doors onto that. I had to trim the tops of these two doors. The front doors I will need to trim the sides as weel because of a small design flaw. I made the porch too narrow for the doors, but I will only need to trim about .25" off of each door.

We also desided that we would use moudling around each door once they are in. It's going to look so nice - I hope.

The roof is Done!

On Saturday I started shingling. Actually I had to do a bunch of things before I started. First I had to put a drip edge on all three sides of the porch, then I put up the Fascia. To do the fascia I needed to cut every roof rafter again to make sure they were all even. I had marked them earlier so it didn't take too long but I had to unscrew some of the plywood to get my saw in there.

So once that was done I screwed down the plywood again and then pounded a ton of nails into the plywood. Then came the ice and water shield (which I don't think I really need but why not). I ended up covering about 80% of the roof with the amount that I had bought. That stuff is nasty!

Then I finally was able to start shingling. I am using architectural shingles (I think that's what they call them). Actually we got them when the roofers reroofed our main roof - we asked for enough extra to finish the porch later. I started shingling away and it started to look pretty good.

I was able to get the front roof completed by the end of the day. I made a trip to Home Depot for some ridge shingles because you can't make them out of the normal shingles if you are using architectural shingles.

On Sunday I thought I was going to take a break but my wife informed me that I was going to finish the job. So I started on the side roofs and then onto the ridge. I was finished by noon! Yippe I have finished the darn roof! I'll have a picture soon.

Here is the latest picture. Sorry I didn't get any pictures of the roof before I slapped up the plywood, but I was excited to see what it looked like. I took two weeks off in the beginning of July - One was at home so I got some stuff on the porch done, but the other week was spent in Maine so I didn't even think about the porch.

Let's see, what happened first. Ah, yes, My friend, Jamie, came over to help me with the beam that sits on top of the wall on the front. It actually turned out to be very easy. I slapped two 2x10 together with 1/2" plywood spacers sandwiched in between to make it the same thickness as the wall. Then we slapped up some boards on each end.

That's where the fun ended. Getting the roof rafters cut correctly was a pain in the ass. I have a book that I used to try to calculate the correct slope and all that, but after doing the calculation about 3 times, with each time getting something that didn't look right, we finally ended up eye-balling it! My neighbor came over and kept telling me to just put the board up there and eyeball it and mark where you think you should cut.... well Steve we finally came around and that ended up being the best approach.

One crappy thing about my design was the hip roof, even after you figure out what your common rafter should be, then you have to figure out what the ridge rafter will be. But since I decided to scrap the calculation and just eyeball that too, it came out almost perfect the first time. Unfortunately the first time we hammered up the ridge rafters (which are the first thing that secures the wall so that the top of it can't move back and forth) we had the wall off square by about 1 inch. But it was the end of the day so we didn't see it. The next morning I went downstairs and looked out and couldn't believe that I could see that it was totally wrong. So all week, whenever I looked out the front windows I got a bad feeling in my stomach. I wasn't sure how to fix it.

When I finally got up there the next weekend I took the ridge rafters down and squared up the wall and screwed in a support (seen in the picture on the front). Then I put the ridge rafters up again... this time we had a square wall. I then finished up all the other rafters ( the ones that go from the ridge rafter out - I can't remember what they are called). Then I got up there and put up the plywood as fast as I could so the rain would stop making puddles on the deck.

Tomorrow I plan on cutting the ends off each roof rafter to make the Facia straight, cut the roof plywood edges straight, and start shingling. I'll have to go buy some crown molding because I want the roofline to look nice.