Make way, dear reader! My crew is steaming ahead at an alacritous boil and would take several miles to stop given their momentum. Where I last left, I detailed the process of erecting the columns and trusses that support Reverend Walker’s Home’s grand pavilion roof. In this entry, you will see the roofing process through to the end. With truth, dear reader, the hot and muggy days have affected me. Most of my time is now occupied with napping. However, my crew, motivated by the promise of a permanent shade structure, carry on without my constant oversight. I trust them to be the thoughtful and disciplined design-builders that I know they are. Let me begin to describe our progress.

After securing the six steel trusses that hold the roof up, the next step was to bridge them with 2″ x 6″ purlins. Purlins provide a surface to screw sheets of roof metal onto. In our case, the purlins are painted white to help brighten the porch areas under the roof. The process involved trimming the 2″ x 6″ material, passing them up to two team members on the scaffolding above, placing and securing them into the manufactured purlin clips that came on the trusses, and bracing them to be 2′ on center. We repeated this process for each bay.

When we finished up the purlins we were ready to put our galvalume r-panel on. On steep roofs, we generally predrill holes on the ground for easy screwing. An issue we quickly discovered with this method is that purlins are normally flat, providing a large surface to drill into and greater tolerance. Our purlins are vertical, meaning much less tolerance. Given that wood is rarely straight, we would have to continuously measure to ensure the holes were drilled in the right spots.

After getting the sheet metal up, the final step was the ridge cap. For this step you will need some ridge cap and a Paul. We used a system of ratchet straps to get the lengths of metal up to him.

As you might have gathered, dear reader, the trust that I have placed in my crew is well-founded. I have done my duty as Captain, and through strict leadership have made them into good sailors. It appears that I may allow my management style to relax in the future, given the frequency of scratches does not suffer any loss. I have little worry of it, dear reader, for they both love and fear me. Ah, it appears scratch-time is immanent. I must cease my musings for a time, but rest assured I will be back with more updates on Reverend Walker’s Home in the near future.

Yours with esteem,

Taterhead