It was clear to me, at the start of this process and certainly as I moved through it, that the roof was going to be the most challenging part of the cabin build. Doubly so doing much of the work on my own. In order to accommodate a loft, and give enough height in that loft, I settled on a roof pitch of 10. In the end it turned out to be more than 10 but more on that later. A roof pitch is determined by how much a roof line rises over the course of one foot of run. So a 10 pitch roof rises 10 inches for every foot of run. A 12 pitch roof is 45 degrees. There's a pretty good view from the peak of this roof. At least this American Pipit thinks so…
The first step would be to get scaffolding up inside the cabin, so there would be a platform to work on up high. The size of the interior and the eventual height of the ceiling meant that you could fit one section of scaffolding, two sections high, pretty much in the centre. There was a lot of climbing up and down, scaffolding and ladders in this project. I didn't need to hit a stairclimber back in town, that's for sure.
The cabin itself is 20 feet long, with a four foot covered deck, so 24 feet of roof. The ridge beam, the board that runs up the centre and supports the joists, was a 24 foot 2×8. Now the longest 2×8 I would have access to here is sixteen feet. Meaning I would have to join two 2x8s together. Surprisingly, that took a lot of thought, as it wasn't simply a matter of scarfing two boards together. Scarf isn't the right term for what I am doing here, which is sandwiching two boards butted together with two short pieces of wood, but I'm at a loss at the moment for the right term. I wanted the sandwiching pieces to fall between joists, so I could tie them to each other, and I needed to make sure that the extra pieces didn't interfere with the slopes of the ceiling or roof. It seems simple enough, and probably is, but I agonized over it for a long time, measuring and calculating over and over.
One good thing about this jointed beam is that the ridge beam doesn't really carry much of the load of the roof, that is done by the joists and the walls, still its an important component.
See what I mean by the view?
Once I had the ridge beam constructed came the next big challenge, how do you get a 24 foot long beam, that probably weighs 50 lbs up to the peak of a roof when you are alone? I eventually hit on a method that happily worked very well. I first constructed the two joists for the back wall and put them in place, which left a notch for the beam. As I wasn't ready to do the same on the front wall I tacked a couple of pieces of plywood that would allow me to place the beam in the right spot. Then along the tops of end walls I screwed long screws in up the wall, every 18 inches or so, leaving a couple of inches sticking up. I placed the front end of the beam at the base of the gable end, supported by the screw, went up a ladder at the back of the wall with the beam on my shoulder and placed it on that wall. Then down the ladder, set up at the front, up the ladder, move the beam to the next supporting screw, then back down. I repeated the process until I had walked the beam up to its place at the peak of the gable walls. Success.
The pole at the joint of the beam is there to support it until joists start going in. And you can't see it in this photo, but there is a hell of a twist in that beam.
There was a heck of a lot of time spent on ladders in this project. Get yourself some good ladders taking on a project, and get more than you think you need.
The next step was to get the joists in place, and that led to probably my biggest, and costliest mistake of the cabin build. And it all stemmed from a mistake earlier on, and assumptions that I had done things correctly at that point.