I was looking over a quote for roofing materials, with which the lumber yard was good enough to include an installation guide for in the quote, and I happened to notice where it said “requires <certain thickness> roof deck, minimum”. And then I realized my roof deck is not that thick. By enough that matters. Shit.
After a little panic — nobody wants to take off a roof deck that’s held down by an unseemly number of ring-shank nails — I realize that I can solve the thickness problem by simply adding a second course atop what’s there. A flush trim router will make it so I can skip a number of precision manual cuts, since the outline of the deck is already ready already.
But then… the skylight curbs will now be one course of decking too low. Again, shit. Again, some thinking. Okay, shim them up by glueing some scrap decking atop their edges – presto – thickness compensation completed.
Will adding a course of decking violate my height limit? Actually, no – I left myself an inch of margin. I’m going to use half of it. And that’s fine. Thank goodness for past me who thought to leave some margin just in case.
Working on the roof is generally terrifying – what with it being 9′ (at its lowest point) off the hard, unforgiving driveway and having no edges to catch me if I start to slip. The good news is the surface is rough and has excellent traction (when the sawdust is carefully brushed off!). Maybe I’ll get clever and tack up a ledger board or something on the low edge for while I’m up there. Even just that would make me feel a lot safer.
The hard part is actually getting the boards up there. They’re heavy and bulky. I can cut them down, but that means more seams to deal with. Still, I’ll probably do that. The first course went up with the help of a rented scaffold. That thing was expensive to rent and hard to use (not quite the right design for this job) but it did make lifing heavy sheet goods to the roof easier than most other ways. I think cutting these down to sane-sized strips is probably the best way. So what if there are 3x as many seams as there might have been. They all get taped up and anyhow there’s a second course below (and roofing above) – no way it’s getting wet in the house.
Still, a lot more work has just been added to my project. Feh.