Raising the Living room roof/ceiling 18" Time allotted: One Week  We drove down Friday after work, so we are getting there around Midnight and started unloading the vehicle and thinking of bed. Walked into the living room and this is what I found. I turned the light off and went back to unloading the Explorer telling myself that this is just a bad dream, it can't be. I'll wake up and everything will be hunky dorie, I never woke up and it isn't hunky dorie, it's more like #&%%@#@$!!!!! This is a flat roof where the yahoo's before us added on and weren't smart enough to figure out how to put pitch on a roof, so they built it flat. And what does a flat roof do? Right, leaks.
 We finally got the Explorer unloaded and went to check it out again and sure enough, it wasn't a dream, welcome to my life. We went to bed and got up the next morning and took these pictures and decided what to do. Leave it, which wasn't much of an option since the ceiling was already only 6' high. Tear it down and patch a bad roof, sheet rock it and wait until the next time it leaked to do something. We decided to take drastic steps and tear it down and raise the roof and put as much pitch on it as we could.
 Second, nothing to do but start tearing it down. It was soggy, hot and musty but no mold. OK,no mold is a small victory but I'll take it. I slowly started tearing down sheet rock and insulation. I stuffed what I could in garbage bags and had to carry out the sheet rock every time I tore some down. Slow work and hot.
 Oh Lord, what am I doing, why me? If you look at the insulation and where it's black and pointed down, you can see water draining out. We put a wasterpaper basket under it and I rung it out like a wet towel. Did I mention I hate insulation. Hate it. I look at it and I start itching and burning from the irritation. The only good thing here is there was no wiring in the ceiling so I don't have to worry about getting zapped. Also, the black is the tar on the backside of the paper that is the glue that holds the insulation to the paper. It isn't mold.
 Third, I stop and take stock of what I have here...got the major part of it done, now I need to clean up and pull nails out that are below my head level or buy band-aids... I opt for pulling nails. Then I stop and take a close look at the roof....This will make you sick, these 2X6's are HICKORY and I don't have time to save them. I have to cut the roof down in 6' X 3' sections so we can get them out to the truck for the dump. I wanted to save them but just didn't have time. Do you know what a 2X6X12' Hickory board would cost, and they were spectacular. Oh, and they were REAL 2X6's not 1.5 X 5.25 dimension lumber, a full 2" X 6".
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 30 feet, divided by 16" is how many of those beautiful boards there were. There had to be 20 of them or so, just made me sick and I do wood working so I could of made some beautiful furniture out of them. But a week to tear down a raise a roof just doesn't allow time to salvage boards. It would of taken us a day to salvage the boards and we didn't have the time. Yes, the 1" X 8" stringer boards are hickory also but it doesn't do any good to cry over tossed out boards.
Sheetrock and insulation in the ceiing is down and I feel the need for bracing to support the roof as we start to tear into it  of PHTO0008.JPG) Now wait, I know what your thinking, your thinking I just had to have the TV on and your right, things are bad but we need TV for entertainment. But at least I was smart enough to leave a space big enough to get it out when we had to. Normally I would frame it up and have to tear one down just to get the TV out. Got my braces in and my thoughts are to tear out a section of roof, put up some of the new joists to help support the exterior wall. If I tear out all the roof and the wall is just standing by itselt it could fall over if the wind came up. So that's what we did.
 A little better look of how we braced the roof. We cut out a piece of roof 12" wide at the end where it attached to the wall. We did a 6' wide area roughly and then removed the old roof and put up a couple new joists to support the exterior wall. It also got us to figure out exactly how we were going to attach the new joists to the existing roof at the peak. I searched the internet and no where could I find where someone was doing what we were so I joined a forum and asked for help. No one would give advice, I think they were worried if they told me how to do it and it didn't work I woud come back on them. I finally wrote how I was going to do it and a guy came back saying that he had done it like I said I was going to do it and it worked for him just fine. Great! Now I have someone to blame if it goes wrong. After all, I'm not responsible for what I do.... am I?
 Here we are with the first little bit tore off of the old roof and the start of our new joists but there's a chimney in the way. Darn it, why is it every time we try to do a little job something has to get in the way. Oh well, you can see at the right side of the picture how we attached the joists to the existing roof. We nailed a 2X10 down at the peak and then determined the angle we would have and took that off the bottom of the joists. It worked, I don't know how and I take no credit for it working but it worked. We laid the first joists down and the tip of the joists came out level with the peak of the existing roof. We also put legs down to the existing roof in the middle of the span and then at the existing wall inside the house we extended them up to brace the joists and to complete the interior wall.
 Another problem we never thought of.... is 4 layers of shingles too much for a roof? When we bought the house the roof leaked so the ignorants that owned it roofed it and didn't tear off the old layers of shingles. We can't add all the weight of another roof and shingles to that many layers of shingles. So we start tearing them off.... and we tore them off.... and we tore them off. For a bunch of cheap people that owned it before us they sure used a lot of nails. We took it right down to the wood but left the nails sticking out. This will later prove to be painful. |
