Roof Work Illuminated

Updates from the last week -- we framed the roof this past week and held a ridge ceremony on Monday night, nailing a pine branch to the ridge. We then completed the rest of the rafter pairs and put the sheathing up. Here's a picture of the cutouts on the exterior plywood where the rafters go. This was measured out beforehand to enable fast rafter installation. The reason for the cutouts was to minimize the amount of material to be removed from each 2x4 for the bird's mouth cuts.

To put the ridge up, as described previously, the rafter coordinates were laid out on the ridge piece on the ground. Here's an action shot of the ridge installation. You can see the metal brackets which were preinstalled on the ridge. Three rafter pairs were sufficient to hold up the ridge.
Next, the plywood sheathing was installed lengthwise (e.g., long side parallel to long axis of trailer). First we installed the shorter piece (at the eaves), which was about 19 inches wide. We then lifted up the larger piece (the full 4'x8' sheet) and rested it on this smaller piece, rotating it around the seam such that it lifted slightly off each rafter so that glue could be squeezed into the gaps. Then we lowered it back into place. Next, we slid the sheet up about 1 inch (up toward the ridge) and installed plywood clips at the unsupported edge for strength. Then we let the sheet slide back down into place and proceeded to place screws every 6-8 inches as for all other sheathing. We found it helpful to stand in the window openings while installing the roof sheathing -- yet another reason not to install the windows quite yet.

There is a double rafter pair at the extreme end (the trailer hitch side of the trailer, i.e., the back wall of the house) since this wall must be wide enough to accommodate insulation. All told there ended up being 9 rafter pairs for this main portion of the roof.

Tonight we finished framing the pseudo-dormer window on the front of the house (it's not really a window but we're not sure what else to call it). We will proceed with sheathing that portion later.