Thursday, August 10, 2017

Rebuilding “Ms. Merry”, the Amerigo–Merry Raises the Roof–Part 1

Well, we just keep jumping around to different tales, now don’t we? 

This is really because in order to get to a larger end goal on Ms. Merry, we have to do a little of one thing so we can do alot of another. 

In this case, we had to do the first half of the bathroom demolition in order to get to the rest of the roof.

As you saw in the Last Demo chapter, the roof framing above Ms. Merry’s bathroom was in pretty rough shape.  

Since the gang and I are going to change the bathroom a bit anyway, we decided to change how the roof vents and everything were as well.   This is going to add a little work for us, but the end result will be a bathroom big enough for Big Matt to stick his big round tuchus comfortably for a shower or a quite bit of contemplation with a book Smile with tongue out

The bathroom isn’t the only reason we’re reframing alot of the rear third of the Ms. Merry’s roof. 

A big reason is the original open for Ms. Merry’s Air Conditioner was turned into a nice skylight by her last owner, which is wonderful because it gives Big Matt a nice place to stick his head when he’s working in the kitchen and wants to stand up good and tall, but now we needed a new home for Merry’s new A/C unit. 

So, we first removed the first two roof joists directly behind the original area where the skylight was:
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Then we built a new frame using 2x4s (Merry’s original A/C vent roof rafters were just 2x2s glued together, basically making a 2x4), so we used a couple 2x4s for the main load bearing area, then laminated the two 2x2 roof joists we’d removed (there was nothing wrong with them) and put them back into place and anchored them back into the top wall beam.

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Once the glue had set on those new joists, we started removing the last couple in the rear that were in really bad shape from where water had gotten to them, enough so that it left a permanent outline on the inside of the fiberglass ceiling from where they were.

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Before we took out the last beam, we cut the new five millimeter plywood to glue in on top of the new roof joists for the A/C so that there’s an even platform for the A/C to sit on and to give the roof a little slope so that water runs away from the A/C unit. 

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We left it like for the night so that the pressure from the fiberglass could act like a clamp on the plywood to secure it via the glue we had squeezed in between the frame and it to bond the two together. 

When we cut the opening out for the new A/C, we’ll drive some flush fasteners in around the perimeter of the open to help secure the layers together. 

Once the glue had dried on the plywood, we went about framing in the new roof joists for the raised skylight area and the new 14x14 Vent-line Power vent that was also going into the bathroom and would be situated above the sink. 

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We plan to reuse the section of roof where the new roof vent is going to fill in the original rear vent’s hole.   More five millimeter plywood is going to be installed across the areas where the old vent openings and new vent opens are to give us something to help re-glass the altered areas.

Once the holes are fully edged with roof material, the new vent frame will be installed on top of the roof and then made into a water proof permanent component onto which the skylight dome will go.

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We’ve got one more vent open to frame in to replace the original 14x14 rear vent that’s being shifted towards the door a little to accomodate the expansion of the bathroom.

We’ll cover its installation and the plywood install in part 2 Smile.

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