The Latest on Lanikai

Lanikai Elementary School has a stage!

When last we spoke about the Lanikai Elementary School stage project (in this post), I was daydreaming about little kids performing the hula on that stage, under that beautiful banyan tree, a short walk away from the picturesque beaches of Lanikai and Kailua.

But, I needed to get my head out of the clouds. We had work to do! Kat managed to hook up with Shawn McKay. He's another parent at the school, a husband to one of the school's teachers, AND an actual contractor! With this video fly-through that Kat made of my sketchup model, and what I am sure was a kick-ass speech she gave at the fundraiser, the school got enough in donations to fund the project.

I'd given them the overall design of the stage, but the school couldn't start building until everything was approved by professional engineers. Enter our new friend Jon, the structural engineer, working pro-bono (on occasion) for the school system. He was immeasurably helpful. I gave Jon this layout plan:

and he turned that into engineered construction drawings:

I took Jon's construction drawings, which indicated but didn't show how the framing would work, and I made this plan to help visualize the framing. That's a lot of lumber!

And I made this model to indicate how the Trex decking should be laid out:

We had some fits and starts with scheduling the construction. We thought for a minute that we'd be able to do the work during the school's Spring break (back in April)- a slender window of time that would have allowed me to fly out to Hawaii to participate in the construction before flying back to NYC and then down to Barbados with Cindy, our friend Kendra, and the Castro's (Bernadette, Arsenio, and Axel) for our dear friends' the Spangler's wedding. But that didn't work out. There were a number of complications, not the least of which was the fact that Shawn-the-Contractor's wife was 9 months pregnant and due to give birth.

Then, one day during the Spangler wedding trip, this picture popped up on my Facebook feed. It documents the arrival of the first pile of lumber. I don't believe I've ever been so delighted by a pile of lumber in my life.

A few days later, Kat posted a time-lapse video of the initial framing of the stage. I was elated to see things coming together! But I'll save that video for later; it's now included in a time-lapse video of the entire build process.

In the meanwhile, here are a few still-shots of the stage framing. I understand that the construction was done both by Shawn McKay's construction team as well as parent volunteers.

I wonder if they bought the stair stringers pre-cut or if some poor soul had to cut them all out individually with a circular saw...

And here's the decking, staged to go on the stage. (You see what I did there? You like?)

And now for the complete construction in under 3 minutes (apologies for the abrupt ending of the music):

Here's Kat's rig for her GoPro camera. I'm thrilled she took the trouble to make that video, because not being able to participate and help really bothered me. Getting to watch the process (even after the fact) helped me not feel so terribly far away.

And here's the best part! Blessing the stage and the kids dancing the hula on it!!

And another best part: everyone uses the stage during recess. Some kids use it to sit and chat, some are dancing, some adults are supervising the kids, and a couple of girls had plunked themselves in the middle to color and draw. That's Kat in the pink dress on the left.

By the way, if I forgot to mention it earlier, I chose to wrap the stairs all the way around the stage this way so that the sides could be used as a small stage or lecture podium if any teachers wanted to bring their classes outside and stay in the shade.

The school is currently working on arrangements to make the hand rails and a safety railing that will go along the back of the stage where the wooden barricades (leftover from the May Day Celebration) are currently standing. I provided the school with 3 hand-drawn sketches when the rest of the drawings were submitted, and we chatted about it a bit today.  The project is down to punch-list items.  I'll post again when they get the railings and stuff up, but other than that, Lanikai Elementary has a stage, and we're all thrilled!!

The Arnold Cabin Project Part 2: Planning

Hi there!  Cindy and I are getting ready to fly to California for two weeks to work on the Arnold Cabin.   If you missed Part 1 of the Arnold Cabin Project, click the link to read all about it.

 Now, before all you mashers and thieves out there in Internet Land get excited about pilfering our television while we're out of town, settle down.  The upstairs tenants will still be home, and we have additional people cat sitting and looking after the green roof.

With the home front in good hands, I'm getting nerdy-excited about our trip.

Here's the plan:  We're going to fly into LAX, rent a car, drive up and spend a night visiting Cindy's twin sister, Jodi in Lancaster.  We can't wait to see the school where she teaches and the new house where she lives. The next day, we're going to drive a bit further up and spend the night visiting Daron and his wife Marianne in California City.  Daron is one of my three fathers, and if you don't know what I mean when I say that, check out this previous blog post: Three Fathers. One Me.  Cindy hasn't met Daron and Marianne yet, and I'm very excited to introduce them!  The following day, we'll head up to Carmel Valley and settle into our housing at Hastings Natural History Reservation.

The Barn at Hastings

I spent this past Thursday night, and all day Friday and Sunday researching metal roofing systems and suppliers for the cabin.  I think I found the right thing - corrugated sheet metal.  It'll stop the rain, last a long time, give the cabin a few more minutes of time if a wildfire comes through, and it'll be in keeping with the style of the cabin.  I have the heart of a loyal restorationist and preservationist, so I really thought hard before moving away from a shingled roof (which is what is currently on the cabin), but I've seen photos of other family cabins with sheet metal on them, so I think my ancestors would approve.

Another thing to consider is the delicate nature of the land and the fact that it's used for natural history research.  Most metal roofing systems these days, it seems, come either coated in paint or a polyvinyl fluoride stuff.  I didn't want to risk all that paint cracking off or the PVCF chemicals leeching or peeling off the roof and getting into the environment over time.  So I chose a product that's as safe and environmentally inert as I could find: 7/8" corrugated sheet metal coated in "galvalume".

From the manufacturer's web site:

The Living Building Challenge (LBC) certification program, administered by the International Living Future Institute, takes a broad view of sustainability and embraces the philosophy of a restorative future by looking at a building’s performance over time.  In fact, certification is not granted until the building has been occupied and its performance documented for one year.

The Institute’s Declare Label is an ingredients-based eco-label around the Red List of “chemicals of concern” that have human health and toxicity impacts.  Declare aims to provide transparency and open communication by allowing manufacturers to voluntarily share their product sources, materials and manufacturing locations.

Metal Sales™ is the first metal panel manufacturer to be included in the rigorous and exclusive Declare™ program. Metal Sales has fully disclosed all of the ingredients in the Acrylic Coated Galvalume® roof and wall panels through Declare, and they are designated as being Red List Free on the Declare Label. 

For more information, please visit www.declareproducts.com

Are you still with me?  I know.  Corporate writing is snoozeville.  I could hardly get through that stuff myself, but I googled around, and it doesn't seem like greenwashing.  Here's hoping I'm making a good choice!

Since I've never built a metal roof, I had a lot of questions in my mind about how to deal with the corners, the roof ridge, the line along the roof where there's a change in slope (which I now know is called a "pitch break"), how the flashing and the roofing panels go together, how to deal with the little gaps under the corrugation, how to cut corrugated sheet metal... 

The internet is a marvel and a wealth of free education if you take the time to poke around and always verify things across multiple sources.  It seems us Americans cut sheet metal with power tools - nibblers and grinders.  In the Phillippines, Australia, and New Zealand, they just snip a nick in the panels and rip them by hand.  Since we won't have electricity (or water, for that matter) at the cabin, I'm excited to give the snip-and-rip method a try.

Well, the metal manufacturer had a bunch of installation diagrams and stuff on their web site, so I downloaded and read almost all of them.  If anyone ever wanted to prove that I'm not normal, they need only point out that I really loved spending three days reading about how metal roofs go together.  

But, before I could order the roofing materials, I had to know the pitch angles of the roof.  There are 3 roof sections on this cabin.  Clearly, the original 12'x21' cabin got too small for my two great-great-grand parents and their 5 children, so they added a section onto one side to make a 21' square cabin.  The new addition - let's call it the West wing - created a second pitch angle.  I took some rudimentary measurements of the cabin when we were out in July of 2013, but there were a couple of critical measurements I didn't think to take.  In order to find the slopes of the roof, I had to trace them off photographs I had taken.  But then I wanted to double check my tracings, so I ended up making a model of the cabin in SketchUp and matching some photos (taken on two different days) to my measurements.  If I did the photo-matching correctly, my measurements were pretty close.  If I didn't, I hope my metal order included more (rather than less) than I'll need - there's a week's lead time for orders, and we'll have to drive to Watsonville for the pickup! 

Arnold Cabin in SketchUp

Arnold Cabin in real life - July 2013

While I think the cabin is pretty square, it's clear from matching the model to the photos that the walls aren't perfectly plumb.  For a roof, square is pretty important so your eaves and gables - the parts that overhang the walls - aren't all crooked.  I'm hoping plumb won't mess me up too much, since I won't have time to starting fiddling with the cabin's foundation.  Someone else worked on that back in (I'm guessing) the '80's, around the last time the roof was replaced.  Want a picture of the foundation?  I'm sure you do:

Family lore has it that the boys slept down here - under the floor of the cabin.  The girls, I gather, slept up in the West wing.

And while I'm trying to impress you with this little cabin, here's a shot of the interior.  That's the front door on the left.  I'm guessing this would have been the living room:

Here's what the ceiling in that room looks like - just shingles on purlins on rafters.  Like my nifty new roofing lingo?  You can see the spot where the wood stove chimney used to be.

And last-but-not-least-ly, this is the West wing with the back door.

So, the plan is to strip off the shingles, sweep out the wood rat poop, nail tin over the rat and wood pecker holes, put the metal roofing system on the house, and replace the missing redwood batons and a couple of broken floorboards.  

Speaking of redwood, I found a guy who salvages old growth redwood logs down in Big Sur.  He's going to be our redwood supplier.  Here's his web site: http://bigsuroldgrowth.com/

Oh, and if there's time, we'll replace the broken window panes and re-glaze the rest.  My Aunt Trish is flying in from Phoenix, my Aunt Lynda is coming down from San Francisco, and a handful of cousins will gather at Hastings for a little family reunion and visit to the cabin on our last weekend.  And for our last night, we'll be heading up to San Francisco to take Lynda home and have a nice visit with my cousin Robert.

I'm looking forward to a great trip.  New roof or bust!!

Roof Railing Update - July 2014

This summer, I've been working on installing the wooden handrail along the tops of the steel railings I made for the green roof.  It's been semi-slow going, though, because my attention has been pretty divided between getting soil and fabric pots set up with vegetables for the growing season, installing drip irrigation for all the container plants, dealing with the plumbing and washing machine issues we've had (more plumbing is in my future for this weekend, in fact - there's a water hammer and a shower faucet leak to solve), and babysitting our godson, Axel.

Oh, and I had a good meeting with a roofing guy about the parapet wall and roof hatch leak problems.  He happens to be a Certified Green Roof Professional in addition to being an experienced roofer, and I had a great time chatting with him.  Here's hoping all of that works out.  I'll give you his name if it does.

But back to the railing project!  As I wrote on the PHL page describing how I made the roof railings (found here or on the left hand side of the PHL web site), I bought a bunch of lumber reclaimed from the rubble of the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk after Super Storm Sandy by Sawkill Lumber.  It's a mix of tropical hardwood species that do very well outdoors in the elements, so I won't have to worry about replacing it any time soon.

I started in April.  The first step was to pull all of the old boardwalk nails out of the lumber.  Alan from Sawkill told me that the "P" stamped on the heads of each nail stands for the NYC Parks Department.

Then, I had to work out the angle of the miters for the ends of the boards.  I laid pieces out on the railing tops and marked the intersections where the boards meet to find the angles. 

For cutting the miters, I could choose between two evils: climbing up and down the ladder and stairs between the basement and roof as I refined the fit of each piece, or I could use a hand saw.  I chose the hand saw for most pieces and went downstairs to my electric compound miter saw for the cuts that needed to be done at precise-yet-unknown compound angles.  That reminds me, I need to learn how to sharpen my handsaws.

And here are the first two pieces laid out.

As I worked my way along the railing, I discovered one spot in particular where one of the boards is sloping into the corner, and one is more or less level.  That's a problem I'll have to figure out how to solve later.  

And here's one of the uprights with the short boards roughed in. 

Now I'm starting to see how the finished railing is going to look.

 And a couple of wide shots of the whole back railing.  FYI - I still haven't started on the front.

By the way, I attached the wood with self-tapping screws from the hardware store.  I drilled holes through the steel slightly wider than the screws, and I ended up needing to drill pilot holes up through the railing lumber, because the self-tapping screws couldn't handle the hardwood.  The whole thing was rather finicky and took longer than I had hoped.  But it's nice to see the complete form of the steel and wood railing together for the first time.

I bought an Arbortech Turboplane for my grinder to do the shaping.  I had been concerned it would dull quickly with this tropical hardwood, but I wrote to the manufacturer and they pointed me to a youtube video of a guy grinding epoxy off a concrete floor without the blade getting dull, so I gave the Turboplane a try.  It worked very well.  I discovered the undersides of the boards and the corners were particularly difficult to shape without getting a lot of chipping and tear-out, so I'm doing a certain amount of shaping with a rasp by hand.  Here are some shots of what I did initially:

I was feeling pretty good about how things were going until I went up to the roof in May and discovered that the screws had snapped on some of the smaller pieces.  We had had some rain, so the best I can figure is that the wood expanded and sheered off the screws.  BUMMER!

I mail-ordered some stainless steel lag screws and spent a couple of days in June taking everything apart and replacing all the initial screws with the lag screws.  All of the broken ones had to be extracted from the wood.  I tried drilling them out, but it didn't work (the screws were too hard to be drilled through), so I stumbled upon this method.  First, chip out some wood around the screw.

Then, grab the end with vice grips and back it out of the hole.

After doing that for all the broken screws, and re-drilling all the holes in the steel and the pilot holes in the wood, I realized I should take the opportunity to do the initial power-shaping on all the pieces before I screwed them back down (to prevent the tear-out on the corners I had experienced back in April).  So, I held the pieces to the top of the railing with clamps and shaped the edges before lag screwing them onto the railing.  Here's the finished product.

After seeing this picture, I decided that's the best place I've found for the home-made digital antenna, so I've since gone up and secured it in place and run the coaxial cable in such a way that it is hardly visible.  After this one dies of rust, I think I'll make one that looks more integral to the fence - like a bug, but hopefully not in a cheezy way.

I've still got the hand-shaping and sanding to do on this railing, and of course, I still have to do the whole front railing, but I'm pretty pleased with how it's turning out so far.  What do you think?

P.S. Happy Birthday to Axel, who turned 1 year old last Sunday.  Cindy and I went to his party to celebrate.  Here he is with his mom and a fiendish face full of ice cream cake and zeppole (or "fried dough" for you non-Italians):

Green Roof Two Step

Hello, pals!  Here's a mid-May update on the green roof.

The last couple of weeks have been what I like to call, a "green roof two-step."  In other words, we've been going two steps forward, one step back.  Is there such a thing as a project without successes and disappointments?  I doubt it.

The first and most stress-inducing problem is that the roof hatch is letting in a slow leak when we have hard rain.  I'm pretty sure it doesn't have anything to do with the green roof system and is more related to the way the hatch was built and installed.  But I'm trying to get a hold of the contractor we used to re-roof the house so he can come and take care of it.  We're within the 10-year warrantee on the work.  I left him a phone message a couple of days ago (without answer), and I sent him an email last night after going up and taping some plastic around the outside of the hatch to see if I can prevent the leak in today's rain storm.  We'll see.  Here's a picture of that bummer from the last rain storm:

There are two other leaking issues that need to be addressed.  One has to do with moisture somehow coming in between our side wall and our neighbor's side wall (our two houses abut each other - I'll take a picture of that some other time).  The third issue has to do with water finding its way into the upstairs apartment's kitchen ceiling through a vent pipe boot when the silt from the drainage rock on the green roof gets washed down to the roof drain and slows the flow of the water off the roof.  For more depression, here's a picture of what that kitchen ceiling looked like in the last storm as well:

Luckily, I can prevent this leak by keeping the drainage rock cleared from the roof drain.  If you ignore the loops of cable (which is for our home-made digital TV antenna), that's the vent pipe on the left, and the water flows down to the roof drain on the right hand side of this photo.  I want to have the contractor look at this issue, because we need a more permanent fix than this.

Come to think of it. I'd say those roof leaks are more than one step back.  Let's say that's two steps back.

But, a few days later, we got some un-related good news!

News 12 Brooklyn sent a reporter, Kena Vernon, out to do a little story on the green roof!  They found us through this blog, which was really pretty neat.  If you'd like to see the story Kena did, you should be able to watch it by following this link to the News 12 Brooklyn site.  Or, here's a copy of the video right here:

Let's hear it for Cindy Keiter wearing her pink pants, ladies and gentlemen!  Also, in case you're wondering what's up with my shirt, I was wearing my roof garden shirt.  See?  There are vegetables flying off the rooftops...

But before we get too happy, and since this is a good news/bad news post, we've got more to talk about.

Now, I've been working on the wooden hand rail that goes along the top of the metal railing on the roof, and after some amount of visiting hardware stores in the area (does no one carry anything better than drywall screws these days?!), I found some self-tapping screws that I decided to use to screw the wood to the steel railing.  After a certain amount of trial and error, I finally got a little system working, and I managed to get all the pieces cut and installed for the back railing.  I'll do a full blog post about the hand rail install process later, but here's the bummer:

Went I went  up to the roof to check it out before the reporter came, I found a piece of the railing section laying on the roof - totally broken off from where I had attached it!  

Well!  At first, I thought, "Who came up here and broke this off?  Were there vandals on the roof?  Did a neighbor come up and stand on this section to look at the chimney?  What the hell happened?!"

But then I noticed that another smaller piece of wood which had been firmly screwed down was completely un-attached, but it was still resting in place.  Did someone break that too and put it back?  I ran around the roof, checking all the pots, looking in my tool bin to see if anything was stolen.  Everything was just as I had left it.  No vandals.

So I went back and looked at all the sections of wood.  A couple of the other small pieces had one of their two screws broken off - all of them broken off right at the top of the steel where the screws enter the wood.  The only answer is wood movement caused by the rain had sheared the screws off.  

I realized all the broken screw ends would have to be drilled out, and I'd have to replace the screws with something stronger, and drill wider holes in the steel to allow for more wood movement.  I calmed down, but was a little wary the whole time that the reporter was going to go to the back of the roof and see my mistake.  While I'm happy to share it with you, I was too embarrassed to have it broadcast on TV.

Luckily, she never wanted to see the back of the roof - probably because the poor dear had to lug her own camera around (I brought it up and down the ladder for her), and she didn't want to navigate the stepping stone path with it.

Then there was another Unfortunate Situation on the roof.  

A couple of days after the news story, while chatting on the phone with my mom (hi, Mom!), I was putting in some drip irrigation fittings to keep these big pots watered.  The main drip line runs behind the pots, and I was trying to keep the little individual lines to the pots semi-concealed, so it was tight quarters.

I was squatting down to do the work, and I was right in front of the first of the four pots - the one on the right.  See that?  The one right next to the skylight...?

Yup.  I cracked a pane of glass in the skylight with my butt!  Such a bummer.  I made a crack - a butt crack - in the skylight.  I put some duct-tape on my butt crack to keep it from leaking...  There's a new glass shop in the neighborhood, and they made us a replacement piece, but it took them a week.  It was a real pane!

A few days after that incident, I came up on the roof to check how the potted plants were doing.  I had moved last year's sage and lavender to two of the fabric pots, and I sewed seeds in the self-irrigating planters and the rest of the fabric pots.  I had gotten drip irrigation fittings installed on all the pots near the sitting area, and I was eager to see if any seedlings were sprouting.

The sage was busy making blossoms (wonderful news!), but the squirrels had dug holes in the soil of all the pots (boo!).  I filled all the depressing squirrel holes (squirrel depression?) before I took a picture, but at least here are the nice sage blossoms.

Ignoring the squirrels for a moment, there were a couple of other nice things.  These hairy hens-and-chicks in the back are making little satellite babies.

And here's Cindy, hand-modeling a little green strawberry:

But, the ding-dang squirrels are a problem.  So I made some chicken-wire basket things to go over the tops of the pots.  I also got some organically raised seedlings from the excellent Silver Heights Farm Nursery at the farmer's market in Union Square last weekend, and our friend Robin (hi, Robin!) came over to help me do some gardening.  I don't have enough dirt to fill all my pots yet, so we stuck some of the seedlings in with seeds I had sewed previously - I wasn't sure if the squirrels had eaten all the squash seeds I planted anyway...

As I said, I was up on the roof last night putting some plastic around the roof hatch to see if that prevents leaking when it rains today, and I took the opportunity to check all the plants with my little flashlight.  The watermelon and squash seeds I thought the squirrels had gotten are now starting to sprout.  They weren't eaten after all!  And the rest of the plants look great.  In fact, the green roof sedum are starting to bloom, and for me, that makes all our little set-backs completely wash away.

Well, not completely, but you know what I mean.

P.S. Special thanks to my dear friend Dave for the pane of glass pun.  The butt crack was entirely my own.

Lynne and Reka's Roof Project (A Retrospective)

Cindy asked me to do a post about this project, so I dutifully comply:

A couple of years ago, some very dear friends of ours, Lynne Boyer and Réka Domokos, asked if I could help them replace their old laundry porch roof.  Lynne is a painter, and she offered to do a trade - paintings for carpentry.  I was totally into the idea, but we had a scheduling issue, because Lynne and Réka live in Hawaii, and Cindy and I live in Brooklyn.

Cindy's mother, Lila, also lives in Hawaii, and Lila started having some health problems, so we started going to Hawaii to help her and the family quite often.  On one of those trips, I made a visit to Lynne and Réka's house to check out what was in store for me.  Here's the state of the laundry roof in 2011.  This is the view from the back yard.

There were some noteworthy problems to try to solve.  First, there were these cross beams blocking their access to the washer and dryer.  In fact, I think the beams were actively trying to hit people in the head when they weren't looking.

Then, there was the fact that the Hawaiian mist was trying to turn Lynne and Réka's laundry roof into a moss garden.

And, the exterior staircase, the one Lynn and Réka use to access their living space, was supported by these 4x4 posts.  But the interior post had somehow long ago been cut short, and a 2x4 was scabbed on to the side of it.  Lynne and Réka's stair case was sagging, and that post was a dangerous bummer.  I wish I had taken a picture of the sagging steps...

Lastly, Réka needed a place to hang her kayak, and they both needed more head room, so we decided to make the new roof slope less.

I'm used to engineering things for theatrical purposes, but I'm relatively new to permanent structures, so the project intimidated me to the point of procrastination.  I did a lot of research - looking for photos of roofs that come off the sides of buildings, etc. as we waited for the stars to align and present us with an opportunity to build the project.  When it came time for Cindy's mom to get moved from her condo into a nursing home on The Big Island, the Keiter kids convened at their parents' Kailua condo to sort through all their family stuff and get the condo ready to be sold.  I wasn't to be involved in that process, but I wanted to be nearby Cindy for moral support.  So I joined her for the trip and planned to spend my days working on Lynne and Réka's roof project while Cindy was working in the condo.  On the flight to Honolulu, I made a sketch of the plan from measurements I had taken on my previous trip:

The day after we arrived, Cindy went to work in the condo, and I went to work on the roof.  There was so much mold in the wood, I thought demolition was going to be easy.  But it turned out to be a big job for me, a borrowed crow bar, hammer, and circular saw, and my muscles, which I brought with me special - all the way from Brooklyn, New York.

I cut the roof down in chunks.  Réka took this shot of me after I'd gotten through the first couple passes.  Honestly, it was a miserable job.

And here's the whole pile of roof chunks.  Such a small pile of wood for such a lot of work.

On to construction!  The first task was to install a ledger board on the house, and on that, I nailed the rafter hangers.  In Hawaii, it's very important that structures are built to withstand high winds and termites.  So I used pressure treated lumber and lots of metal joist hardware.

 Next, I had to install the posts that would support the roof.  I wanted to transfer the weight of the staircase to the supports for the laundry roof, so I could cut that offending 4x4 post out.  I also wanted to make more un-impeded space in the laundry area, so I decided to move the support posts to the outside of the walkway.

 Cindy was on temporary work relief from her mom's condo the next afternoon, so she cheer-led and helped me mark the locations for the posts.

Réka took a lot of these photos.  She's an excellent photographer.  And there's Lynne in the back, with her million dollar smile.  I'm fiddling with the first of 3 post anchors we had to install.

I used a borrowed hammer drill to drill the bolt holes in the concrete.  This is me marking the drill bit depth with a piece of tape.  It looks like Cindy brought her muscles from Brooklyn too!

 The rains came just as we finished up.  On one of the 3 post anchors, the bolt stuck up too far, so not having a hack saw, I just drilled a hole in the end of the post so it would sleeve over the bolt.  Here's the offending post anchor:

 The rain was also pretty lucky.

 The next morning, Cindy was dressed to impress, and I got started on installing the posts.

 We made a temporary work bench for their mitre saw out of some cinder blocks and planks that were lying around.  Cindy mock-nailed the chop saw down while I got the screw gun and prepared to anchor the saw for-reals. 

Now, we were in business.

I put the two end posts in place and temporarily braced them with 2x4's.

 Then I installed the horizontal beam and braced the whole structure back to the house with the first two rafters.

The slope looked good.

I installed the 3rd post and had most of the rafters up in no-time.  Unfortunately, I made a measurement error, and the rafters weren't coming off the house at a perfect 90-degree angle, so I had to go back through, pry all the nails out, correct the problem, and re-nail the rafters to the cross beam.  That was a pretty big bummer, and I was too embarrassed with myself to take any pictures of the rafters before I corrected their position.  So here's what it looked like when I was done for the day and everyone was talking story.

The next day, I removed the cross braces from the original posts, finished installing the last of the rafters, and through-bolted the old stair support posts to the rafters.  

I also installed little cross braces at the tops of the support posts - mostly because I like that sort of style.

And a wide shot at the end of the day: 

The next step was to put the plywood on the roof.  That's pretty standard stuff.  You tack some plywood up to give yourself a walking/working surface, and then you cut plywood pieces to fit - starting from the highest side of the roof and working down the slope.

By this time, the Keiter's were through sorting their mother's condo out, so Cindy came to work with me every day for the rest of the project.

 She was an excellent assistant, although how she hammered nails in this position, I have no idea!

Here we are using a chalk line to mark where the rafters run, so we could nail the plywood down along the interior rafters as well as the edges.

Et, voila!  Shade returns to the washer and dryer.

Next came the roofing membrane.  We bought a two-part peel-and-stick system with some aluminum edging.  The manufacturer instructions specified that the layers had to be unrolled and left to flatten out in the sun for a little bit.

Then we cut the first run to length and put it in place.  When installing roofing membranes, you start with the low end of the roof so that subsequent courses overlap in the direction that the water sheets off the roof.  We also started with a skinny course of the underlayment so that the seems for that layer didn't line up with the seams for the top layer.

Cindy supervising me.

 The edging goes on before the second/top layer.   It's just tacked down with nails.

 It got pretty hot on the black roof in the sun.  Here, Lynne caught us taking a break. 

Cindy doing the peel for the second layer, which is folded in half length-wise and done in two steps.  First, the upper half.  Peeeeeeel.

Gently pick up.

Flop over, and stick.

Then, since we didn't have a big weighted roof roller, we marched over the seams with our feet to make sure it was well stuck down.  We met in the middle.

P.D.A.

Repeat the process in the hot sun a few more times, and you've got yourself a finished roof surface!  But there was still more to do.

First, I removed the offending 4x4 stair support post with a handsaw.  Before the project, the stairs to the house had been sagging, so I jacked the post up to make the steps level before I bolted it to the rafters.  When I cut the post off below the rafters, the stairs stayed solid - much more solid than they were before, in fact.  And they were level.  A success!

I have no idea what I was doing in this photo:

I installed some new cross bracing above the new roof line, just in case.  The structure was quite solid without it, but I figured it might be helpful if a typhoon came or something... And here's Keiter with a howzit for you.

Lastly, we nailed a plywood barrier between the stair support post and the house to protect the water heater from the elements.

And, we installed some pulleys and rope cleat for Réka's kayak.

I had hoped to paint the new roof for Lynne and Réka too, but there wasn't enough time in our trip.  So Lynne and Réka took care of that part.  Here's a couple of shots of the finished project as we left it for them.

No more posts and cross braces wanting to smack your head while doing the laundry, and plenty of room for Réka's boat.

The roof was so sturdy, I really wanted to put a little green roof on it.

That little roof certainly has a lovely view - this is looking out towards Honolulu Harbor.

It was a beautiful sunset, but I also just like this picture.

Our fee?  These beautiful paintings by Lynne Boyer.  If you don't know about Lynne, she started out as a professional surfer and became the Women's World Champion in 1978 and 1979.  And now she's a full-time artist, doing paintings mainly in Hawaii and Hungary, where Réka comes from.  You can see more of Lynne's artwork at her web site: lynneboyer.com

Ta da!