Some Lessons Learned

Its been a while folks.

Silly season round here.

Parades, meetings, spring cleaning and planting, yard work (some left over from last year, and the year before)

And then there's the roof.

Looming overhead.

Whats been holding my house together for 130 years.

I'm proud to say that work has begun. Some remedial repairs have been made, and some demolition and new construction has been completed.

The main part of Our Humble Castle was built in 1881 with 1881 construction methods. Post and timber framing, with pegged joints and a plank roof. An addition to the rear around 1910 added 300 square feet and a small valley to the roof profile. Methods and materials didn't seem to change much over those 30 odd years.

Fast forward to the late 1980's, when the previous owners decided to replace the roof. Instead of tearing off the three layers of shingles on the back, they decided to build a whole new roof over the existing one, taking out the valley. They did not cut back the old roof, they simply made the fascia extra wide. This produced a gap of roughly 7 inches in the middle of the valley. This is what I am now correcting.

So I have to peel off plywood fascia, and expose the old roof. Then cut it back flush, put up some extra bracing and attach new 1' x 6" fascia boards ready for cover.

Sounds easy, right?

Wrong.

You'd figure that an industrial r-saw with "demolition blades" (I got a capital Y chromosome just buying them) would go through 100+ year old planks like a hot knife through butter.

Not so.

The 1" thick planks and flat iron nails chewed these blades up like popcorn. I had to change blades every 5 minutes and soak them in kerosene to clean and cool them. The soaking also cleaned the asphalt that was clogging the teeth.

Then the genius that did the work before, hadn't properly braced the overhang, only providing support every four feet where joints occurred. So someone has to install them.

130 year old plank roof.

So, as with every project I get involved with, there was much more work than I had figured.

In the end, 25 feet of demolition and and remedial construction took me roughly 18 hours over two days.

Lessons?

That 130 years ago, things were built to last. I wonder how many of the new 'manufactured' homes will be around 130 years from now.

That you will need twice as many 'demolition blades' as you figure.

That 130 year old planks, while tough to cut, make excellent coals for cooking bratwurst.

DJW

Somewhere, the men that built this house are laughing at DJ.