Roof Progress

Roof

The challange of building a timber frame house can be daunting at times. I have spent many a sleepless night trying to figure out the roofing system. If you have lots of money you buy SIP (structural insulated panels) and raise them to the roof and lock them together. The reason that this is necessary is that after all the work of having exposed roof joists (mine are 3x8 fir) you don't want to cover them up with your ceiling insulation and roofing material.

What I had decided to do is build a box rafter on top of the ceiling. We essentially did everything in reverse order of a regular house. We put the ceiling in first. I used 1x8 planned fir. It looked awesome. Then we put the vapour barrier. I then boxed out some rafters that sat on top of the fir rafters. We infilled with insulation (we did 2 layers and created an R44 roof) We then used 2x8 fir for strapping. It had to be this size as the spans between rafters is 6 feet. Then on top of the strapping we mounted the tin roof.

It took most of Sunday to complete one section. I am thinking that the rest will not take as long now that we know what we are doing.

Helpers

Good progress

Friends

Measuring

I was very impressed with the progress we made today. We set 3 bents in place and tried to get them close to plumb. I will need an additional day to square them up.

Looking and Thinking

first roof truss