Metal Roofing

So we've finally put a real roof on the house!  It was about time, as I don't think a heavy snow would have been good for our tar-paper roof.  This is a stainless steel roof, and will hopefully outlast the headaches that it's caused me.  There are companies that make stainless steel roofing (Follansbee comes to mind), but they were a bit beyond our price range.  Instead, we bought two giant coils (2500# each) of stainless directly from the mill and had a local roofing send it through their machine to create the standing seam profile.  The headache came from first estimating the roofing required, then converting to square feet of flat metal and finally converting this into pounds of material.  Mostly I worried that I would make a mistake and end up 200 square feet short and have to put asphalt shingles on the back side of the carport, for example.

Here's the breezeway again, but finally with a roof overhead.  We used the same 1/2" clear polycarbonate for the roof that we've used elsewhere on the walls.  Beyond the simple satisfaction of forward progress, it makes a nice protected work area.  The black rods at the top of the image are 3/4" steel with turnbuckles at the center to prevent the base of the roof from spreading under load.

That's Brian on the ridge, placing clips to attach the ridge cap.  Here you can see the transition from the metal roof of the carport to the clear polycarbonate and back to metal.

And a closeup of that transition...  Needless to say, this roof is slippery - especially when it gets wet.  There was no way to stand on it while we installed the metal.  Everything had to be done from ladders with hooks that caught the ridge.  We would install a piece of roofing, climb to the ridge, move the ladder 16" and climb back down for the next piece.

The view from the north again.  The roof makes the house look much larger than it actually is.  I've never liked huge houses, and I find myself on the defensive when people come to visit the job site.  The house is just over 2000 square feet.  But we've installed over 5000 square feet of roofing (metal and poly combined).  The pitch of the roof, the deep overhangs and the breezeway / carport, together make the house appear much larger.