The Porch Roof

Some of you may recall that last year my retired brother came to our house and rebuilt our main bathroom, with some help from my sons and me. Since he is still bored with retirement and my house still needs a lot of work, he came back this year for more projects. We started with the porch roof; we had intended to do more, but the porch roof ended up being a bigger job than we thought, so that was all we got to. 

Back when we moved into this house our home inspector pointed out that our shingled porch roof was not steep enough for shingles to work properly, so, he said, it was going to fail and leak. And it did; by this summer it leaked catastrophically. So the project was to get rid of the shingles and install a proper low pitch roof.  I was going to do it another way but my brother said anything but rubber was too amateurish to contemplate, so rubber it was. Demolition was a family project, with all my children pitching in. That's my son Thomas.

I knew that one part of the porch roof had failed, so when I picked up the rubber I had already bought one piece of plywood. But removal of the shingles showed that the rot was much more extensive; the whole lower layer of plywood had to be replaced. Worse, some of the rafters were also rotted. All of the missing plywood in this picture was so rotted we had pulled it out with our hands.

But this actually pleased my brother, since sistering in new rafters is just the kind of carpentry he enjoys and is good at. As opposed, for example, to installing a rubber roof, something none of us had ever done before. Thank the stars for how-to videos on YouTube.

The repaired roof, in the blinding sunlight with which nature blessed the project. The project spilled beyond the weekend and into the work week, and I had calls so missed most of the main event, the actual installation of the rubber sheets. So there aren't any pictures of that. As it happened we finished on Tuesday evening (two weeks ago), just in time for torrential rains on Wednesday. And the porch stayed perfectly dry. Finished roof below and at top.