We have been planning what to do with our “shed” across the street since the day we moved to the Long Shot Farm. This building has a great cemented foundation, relatively decent windows and the entire building was at one time insulated. However, the roof had been home to a significant holiday display each winter, including Santa, a sleigh and reindeer – permanent metal railings had even been installed on the roof to anchor this contraption. Sadly, these decorations caused the roof to sag in the middle – which meant that fixing up the shed is a much more complex project that first hoped…so we had to put if off a while.
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| Jeff and Tina started on Friday afternoon |
Luckily, earlier this year we were able to purchase a very nice standing seam metal roofing system from a contractor friend at a very reasonable price. But with the fruit and garden, we just had very little time to devote to the project. We worked on it off and on – emptying the shed, tearing out all the inside boards and removing the old insulation. We also reinforced to roof from below, by first using metal chains to “pull” the building together, and then installing additional joists.
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| Progress by Friday evening |
For the last week or so, Jeff has been cutting the pieces of roofing panels to the correct size – we need 22 pieces of each side of the roof. This weekend we finally got to install some of it. Tina and Jeff started on Friday evening, tearing down the bottom row of the old asphalt shingles, and reinforcing the edge by attaching 2×4’s below the roof. We then installed the drip edge, which is part of the roofing system on both sides of the roof. The next step involved attaching sheets of house wrap on top of the old shingles, to protect the new metal roof from scratching – we did this with simple roofing nails. We actually attached only about 2 ft of the plastic sheeting, and kept the rest rolled up – since this sheeting is very slippery, and the asphalt shingles provided a lot of traction while working on the roof.
Then we finally got to attached the first panel with the appropriate brackets, and then snapped the next panel onto it. We managed to get the first three panels up before it got too dark.
Jens and Zach were both around to lend a hand on Saturday, which speeded up the process a lot. Of course with the 3 boys around, there was also some goofing off….especially when it came to teasing Tina (who does not like to work on roofs)
We finished the first half of the roof by Saturday evening.
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| Finished first side by Saturday |
Sunday was spent mostly playing with Toben and Fiona, and visiting with their parents, as well as with Grammy and Ruth from Bedford county.
