The Great Fluffening Part 3

Today started off with the second half of the resupply mission, this time to the Home Despot instead of Lowes, in search of some universal wood, bits of hardware to redo the car hole door opener mount (for later), some insulation tape, a slightly larger ladder and a bunch of wee little soffit vents. As such, I didn't make as much progress on the actual construction as I might have liked, but things are still on track.

On that construction front, one of the things I wanted to get out of the way before burying it under insulation was to deal with this ridge board.

There's a board attached to the rest of the roof that the valley rafters connect to, and there's the ridge board, and then there's just an air gap between them for no particular reason, spanned by a few toe nails.

So we'll at least tie those together a little bit.

Well, good enough. It'll soon be hidden from view at least.

Next up was getting rid of what I hope is the last bit of rafter detritus, these peculiar hook-like objects.

I have no idea what they were used for. Looking up the patent number on the silver part reveals that it's a part of a spring attachment for a garage door counterbalance, which is certainly not what it was doing up in my rafters.

I'm pretty sure the white metal is just a completely random chunk of... something unrelated. Whatever. It's in the recycle bin now.

So on to the actual framing. I want to have some ventilation space up at the ridge, particularly to connect with the perpendicular roof section closer to the house which would otherwise be quite difficult to vent. I had initially planned to cut the universal wood at an angle to be able to nail it to the underside of the rafters, and carefully measured the pitch of the rafters to be 3-in-12, cutting the board to fit.

Then I discovered that the pitch of the roof near the ridge board is more like 4-in-12, maybe 4.5. Yeah building a roof with 2x4s spaced 24 inches on center is apparently a recipe for a lot of sagging. I mulled things over for a bit before finally settling on a reasonable path forward.

Just cutting the boards square and installing them as rafter ties is way easier, though it will mean I'll need to trim the insulation around the rafters when installing the topmost pieces, but that's a problem for future-me.

I think it's going to take a little while for this new universal wood to age into the same color as the old stuff. But I'll never know, not after it's buried under insulation.