One of the most challengng areas of the house project has been the dormers. The upstairs windows were a last minute addition to the house (as were the upstairs rooms). The first challenge was how to build the curved roofs and window headers and how to blend them into the big roof. Harold's cew did a great job with those things. The Penfold's roofing crew did a fabulous job putting the recycled rubber roof in place, making sure to keep the lines nice and straight. It took a lot of fiddling to get it right.
Then we sent Harold's crew back up to the roof to fit and install the soffits into these tricky areas. Their mandate was to get things fitting perfectly so no squirrels or other wiggly critters could squeeze into the attick space. Colin, Ryan and Benji did a wonderful job, even taking the time to line up the indents on the corners.
Then it was back in our court. Our crew stapled on the galvanized mesh and squeezed up into that impossible space to apply and carve the concrete. Peter did the bulk of this work and managed to do it without leaving a wide swath of waste concrete on the roof. With our summer crew gone it fell to me to apply the paint to the facias, soffits and walls of the four dormers. The first two on the front were tricky but as long as I moved slow and carefully there were no big issues. The third one which I started today was a slightly different story. Without the lower eyebrow the roof was all 12/12 pitch. That's a 45 degree slope in case you don't understand how pitch is calculated. A roof that steep is hard to stand on without hanging on to something (for dear life) to stop a quick trip to ground level. And that was the easy part. To add a degree of difficulty the hot sun baked the roof to a point that was a bit too warm to touch.
With two roofs coming together and the dormer squeezed into the middle it was necessary to hook my heels over the ridge cap and then lower myself, head first under the soffits to I could see what I was painting. I managed to not get paint on the roofs but I wasn't so lucky. It was my face that was acting as a drop cloth. Matt (who took this picture) was loading my brush when I came up for air. I was determined not to come down until this difficult task was done. We had a late lunch. :)
