Are we Roof Ready?

This morning I drove 75 miles to get corbels for my front porch. I didn’t really like the specified design (“Arroyo Seco”) so what I had made (while I waited) is more like the elevation drawing (“Santa Fe”), which I sketched myself without looking at the drawing or thinking about it too much.I also tried to get brackets made to hold the trellises over the south-facing windows. We won’t build the trellises yet, but the brackets are bolted into the walls, so they must be installed soon to ensure the walls are air-tight. However, the welder was away from his shop the two times I stopped by. He has plenty of work. There was a road grader, a propane truck, a large hay baler, and a couple big trucks waiting for work, as well as several projects in the shop and two very long beams waiting to be loaded onto an equally very long trailer for delivery. Makes my little brackets look like chicken feed.

We are now lined up to get a rubber roof on the house. However, we better have something under the rubber membrane! Jake spent most of the day cutting and nailing down the main roof deck in the blazing hot sun. (It was well over 90° in the shade today.) But we still need to build and deck the mechanical room (small second story) and the front porch.

The porch is — so far — just a couple of huge beams. Tomorrow morning I will go to the local sawmill and look for vigas (poles to act as visible rafters), a corner post (which we will probably need to taper by hand), and rough-sawn random-width pine boards to act as a ceiling for the porch (above the vigas).

Above the pine porch ceiling we will add tapered slats so that the roof deck panels will slope towards the drain — which will be a scupper (as on a ship, but here called a canale in Spanish, meaning channel in English). I need to build parapets for both the porch roof edges and the mechanical room and the crew needs to install the parapets.

Then the inside wall of all the parapets needs sheathing and the three canales installed. At least the plumber came today and installed the drain pipe for the central roof drain, which he also delivered. In case you are wondering why we need both a scupper and a central roof drain — where will the water go if the central drain plugs or the rain comes faster than the drain can take it away?

The scupper on the edge of the main roof is an overflow. The front porch roof is independent of the main roof and needs its own drain (scupper). And the mechanical room needs a method (scupper) to drain its roof from within the parapets.