LESLIE: Sean in Indiana listens on Discovery Radio Network and you’re thinking of adjusting your roof, not replacing it. What’s going on?
SEAN: I am putting a hip roof onto my house and I need to try also laterally into an existing roof and I’m wondering how that connection should be made and how they’ll – it should all level itself out.
TOM: Well, is the hip roof going to be like coming off, say, parallel – or I should say perpendicular – to a regular gable roof?
SEAN: Yes. It’s coming off – exactly – off a gable roof. And then, as it planes back, it’s going to tie into making a nice valley. But as that valley also comes across, it’s going to be meeting into an existing garage roof.
TOM: OK, well roof framing is probably one of the most difficult home improvement projects to do. It’s something you really need a lot of experience with and a very comprehensive knowledge of a framing square. That being said, generally the way you tie two roofs together is you put a sleeper down on top of the roof that’s the old roof. So in other words, you might put, for example, a 2×8 on the flat right where the new rafters are going to attach. And then each one of them has a hip cut so it goes – it has actually two angles; one front and one to the side – think of crown moulding with a compound angle on it – and that ties in to the sleeper. And then once that’s in, then you sheathe it and go from there. But again, it’s not something that’s a very simple do-it-yourself project, but it something you want to get done just once and get it done right because if you don’t do it right, it’s going to look really, really bad and it’s going to signal amateurish work. So I would get some help and have a pro help you do that because it sounds like it has a lot of intersections and it’s got to line up just right.
Sean, thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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