With the roof of the house now properly supported on the new exterior wall, the next step is to remove the roof of the bump-out itself, which is gabled perpendicular to the house. For this project, the always stalwart Dean assisted. There were two key parts of this process: remove the roof of the bump-out itself, then patch the triangular hole in the roof of the house where the bump-out connected. I had the idea of using the sections of roof we were removing to patch the hole directly. While that’s what we did and it worked, in retrospect it wasn’t the best plan.
Inside the bump-out attic
My thinking was that the sections of roof would be too large and unwieldy to get into the house, just to turn around and get the replacement roof pieces back up. While that much was true, the better plan would have been to remove the shingles and put them back on. Instead we cut and fit the pieces of already-shingled roof sheathing into place and I had to knit the shingles together. It looks terrible, even for a temporary patch, and we’ll be lucky if it doesn’t leak, though so far it’s been holding.
We started by removing the rafters of the bump-out from underneath, then the original board sheathing (which was underneath the newer plywood), and finally the sections of roof closest to the house, first on one side, then on the other. Because there wasn’t room in the attic of the bump-out for two people, Dean removed the windows of the bump-out while I worked on the un-framing.
Dean removes windows
The larger sections of roof were too hard to get a handle on, so the next step was to remove the gable end. Because it was from the inside out, we took off sheathing followed by the three layers of siding. With the end exposed, we were able to get the section of roof off, cut it into a triangle, and fit it onto the house. By this time it was well into the evening and with no rain in the immediate forecast, I decided to call it a day.
The next day was Sunday and I got the other triangle of roof into place. This still left two smaller triangle-shaped holes at the outside edges of the bump-out, but I couldn’t finish those until the walls of the bump-out were gone. I put a plastic sheet over the wall, which later served to funnel water directly into the house rather than keeping it out, but I’ll get into that with my next post.