May 21 - June 2: Sheathing and Papering the Roof

The last two weeks have been a monstrous effort to get enough roof on the house to keep it dry through the neverending Vermont monsoon season. After we put the sun porch rafters on over the previous weekend, Joe spent a couple days framing walls on the gable ends of the second floor. Julie's Uncle Tom came up from New Jersey and spent almost a week helping us on the house. They started putting plywood on the sun porch roof around the middle of the first week. See the sunny weather in the picture on that day? It's a rare occasion in VT these days and worth noting.

The sun porch roof has a pretty gentle pitch, so it wasn't to dangerous work. The rest of the roof was different story, so we got some body harnesses that we attached around the roof peak. In the event of a fall, you'd get to dangle instead of hitting the ground. They're pretty attractive too. After the sun porch was sheathed, we moved on to the steep slope of the roof. This work was a little more scary, as we basically did it by standing on the bottom plate of the rafter wall while nailing the plywood in front of us. Hard to explain, but in short there was only about 8 inches of surface to stand on while putting up the plywood.

After we got that done on both sides, we moved to the upper slope of the roof, which is at a pitch that you can actually walk on (6:12). Eric and I spent a couple days doing this while Julie and Sarah (visiting for the weekend, she took a large number of the pictures) acted as our crack support staff. Sarah took the second picture from inside the house as Eric and I were laying down some plywood near the roof peak.

Next we moved down to the roof overhangs. Since these can't be walked on until they are nailed down, we had to bring in the big guns: Joe and the towable lift. Joe had been using the lift to do trim boards around the roof, and rigged up a system to use the machine to get the plywood into place. Once the sheathing was done, we were able to focus on putting tar paper and "ice and water shield" on top of the plywood. These serve to keep the house dry until the shingles go on (sometime in the next couple months). Getting this done was touch and go, as we (shockingly) had significant rain on our last couple work days. Friday was our final work day, and Eric and I put the last of the material down at about 7:30 pm. The house will stay dry!!