Last Updated on: 1st July 2023, 05:25 pm
Turning a flat asphalt roof into a pitched roof
This video is all about turning a flat asphalt roof into a pitched roof later on. You see the stages of removing the asphalt roof, building the new roof structure, felting and battening, tiling with concrete tiles, cutting into the wall and sealing the edge with lead, and then finishing off with the gutters. First, let’s get on with removing the asphalt. As you can see, the roof is in pretty poor condition. The asphalt seems to have become porous, or it’s cracked or something, and the water has gone into the roof and rotted it severely.
The quickest way to remove the asphalt
What I found is the quickest way to remove the asphalt, which is a pretty heavy covering of, in this case, about 10 to 15 mil. You can see here, I’ve cut where I want to remove it and whether they used to cut it first quickest to use a circular saw. This is where the coarse wood cutting blade on it, and I set the cut’s height to be equivalent to the height of the asphalt, which is about 10 to 15 mil plus the size of the plyboard underneath, which is about 18 mil.
Then it cuts through most of the ply in the joist or cutting through the joist too much because it’s a flat roof. What you have is a joist and some tapered spacing piece of wood on the top to give it some slope. So once I’ve cut it and then basically got some sue started in a corner, got some screwdrivers down the slot. Leave it up once you start, then the best way of getting a fair amount of leverage needs to get a spade.
Fine, then get yourself a hammer, sharp and give it a whack, and what will happen is that will crack off. They can pick it up and dispose of it by, in this case, we’ll also need to remove, obviously it’s rotten, so I’m going to do grinding through the nails, that’s attaching on it with an angle, grinder and then pry out the apply board.
That’s how to remove the asphalt. I’m not a great fan of asphalt. It seems to have become porous, or it’s got micro-cracks in it or something – and it’s very heavy covering as well, so what’s probably more cost-effective for me, at least on this roof, is I’m going to replace it with a pitched roof. This is just a temporary cover, so you have made a little frame out of fence rails. Put some tarpaulin over it. Also, you don’t want water coming into the room below hum, try not to disturb the room below. That’s how to remove asphalt quickly. So next onto building the roof structure, I’m not going to detail every single stage literally. Instead, this is to give you a flavor of how the project is done now.
As you can see here on time-lapse, you can see the roof structure going up and roughly how it’s built. I’ll detail some of the timber sizes in a minute. The roof rafters, which Are the diagonal pieces going up to the top? They would typically rest on a wall plate, which is a piece of wood, sits on top of the wall that would typically be on the inside wall, with sufficient overhang for the depth of soffit or overhang over the roof that you want. Still, on this particular wall, they’re resting on the outside wall because of its structure.
The roof frame
So, as you can see, here’s the frame structure. Things are a bit different on this roof. You notice that we don’t see the joists running across; usually you’d have the joist join the rafters. So these are the rafters, the joists of the horizontal pieces. They would support the ceiling supporting any floor inside that area, but because it’s an existing flat roof.
Of course, the joists are well down here under the installation and challenging to tie the rafters’ choices, so the architect had some relatively high up collars those horizontal pieces at the top. The idea is basically to stop these Timbers from spreading due to the tiles’ weight on the roof. Unless you’ve got something like we’ve got here or you’ve got joists connecting to the rafters of the roof, then the inclination will be for the roof to come down and these to come out from the side.
If you rely on the wall to stop that happening, you can get cracks in the wall, so we’ve bit some additional ties in as well. These two going across and a couple joining down to the existing joists’ joys onto the rafters, to increase the support that the roof has to stop it spreading yeah, so should be fine.
Now, these hips are eight by two wall plates for four by two. I don’t pretend to be a roofing expert. By the way, I’m just sharing my experience of how a carpenter friend of mine built this roof did a good job. I think I was a little bit tricky because the wall on that side was a stud wall, so we had to build some additional joists going across a couple of nine by twos to support a double wall plate. As you can see, it had to be higher because it’s a little bit in from the outside wall right down there, so you see how it’s constructed.
We got fastened over here the selected two by one for supporting the soffit. Underneath, we have this piece of roughly six by one inch to keep the outside face. Yeah, you will note there, actually ordered an insufficiently deep fascia board. So this is a mistake. That’s being made – and I should be at least about that sort of depth of the fascia board. I’m going to bear joiner on this and just put a filling piece on it. I’m going to staple it down staple gun and then but battens on top, two by one piece of batten wood that goes horizontally across, which holds the tile, so we’ll come back to it when I’ve done that.
The felt is breathable, you don’t need any vents
As soon as the felt is added, it’ll be waterproof; because it’s a breathable felt, you don’t need any vents in the soffits to ventilate the roof. So you can now see. We’ve started putting the breathable felt on and the battening simultaneously that aids in climbing up the roof to do the top bits. There are nearly 45 about 42 degrees, slope so quite challenging to climb on without the battens on the ladder. And as a couple of things, you need to work out how the tiles will sit. So you don’t want that end tile drooping down because it’s not sitting on top of another time.
So you need to make sure that it’s resting on peace of word or pattern. That’s your board, basic board, and the other thing you need to work out is how many tiles are going to make it to the top; that thinks 11 tiles from here to the top, so works out quite nicely, otherwise giddy that decreases the pitch slightly to give It a nice even number or pull it as the matter to match.
You could just cut the tiles when you get to the top, but it’s useful having a whole number, and then you’ve still got the ledge sits on the edge of the table or holding it against the batten. And, of course, you can put a nail through to keep it on the back as well, so this is where you want to lay the felt horizontally. Then you can get a good overlap. I think this line is the recommended overlap of the felt and battens.
Make sure you get an excellent overlap around corners, so run this sheet over and down to the bottom, and then any water that gets in the edge of this sheet will go down the first sheet layers and continue like that until you cover the whole roof and it’ll be spread. So the bands are roughly about two inches by one inch and use galvanized nails to hammer them in on each rafter.
Avoid pooling of water
The other thing I tried to avoid here is having any pooling of water. If it does have to run down this felt, so I always tried to maintain a little bit of a sloping angle of the felt rather than having it flattens out a slight angle on the pattern. Hopefully, you then won’t get any water gathering behind the bottom. Ashere you can see, I finished the felting and the battening, which means the roof is now watertight. Well, how long has it taken so far? So two carpenters were here on the first day to build the roof structure, and they finished that just one of the guys on the second day.
Simultaneously, I was doing the inside insulation and then when they’d finished did the felting and most of the battening. Because rain is due that night, it’s quite a long day to make sure I got all the felt done, so that took me till about ten thousand nine in the evening to get it watertight. Then you’ve got a little bit more time in which to sort out some of the details like getting your tiles, fitting them, putting bird stop.
So the important thing when fitting these patterns is to make sure they’re all parallel, so as you do them measure the distance between them, try and keep it consistent and same down. Otherwise, your tiles won’t be fitting correctly. So, if you imagine these two tiles are your roof. If these two battens are diverging slightly, but an angle on the tile will respect to the other one, it’s like the gap between them, which isn’t great for waterproofing, whereas if they’re perfectly parallel, then, but exactly there may be a good seal.
So you need to measure that; as you go up, I’m doing some trial fitting or some of these tiles to make sure this bottom tile sits at the right height on this bottom batten. Weird, the birds stopped the piece of plastic in place. So if you push on this second tile, you should find that that tile fills Master steady if they sing a little bit too low, they’d like to like come up as you’re, pushing on that and also check on the side. Whether the angle looks correct, if you’re happy with that some rooms have a small little decrease in angle coming out this one, I want to keep perfectly straight, so it’s worth taking a bit of time over that I like to fix this bird stopper piece of plastic. The idea that has the name implies is to stop birds getting up in your roof.
The bird stoppers
Hollow birds can get up there; they’ll nest on the top. It’s it when you felt loads of crap in there might even eventually hole it which could ruin you, your waterproofing, so for only a pound, a meter or so or less.
This bird stopper really discourages birds from getting up there, and you can see how it sits. You want it tile sitting, so the plastic bends out that way and looking here how that sits and that stops the birds getting in, but also it maintains the ventilation in the roof. Here I was going to cut that off to match the overhanging tire later joined piece on the fancy eventually yet got sorted. I would recommend trying to order the right size of plastic in the first place. That’s my choice. This is my house, be careful when you fit these birds stopper pieces of plastic that your screws don’t puncture,
Of course, they felt underneath, so don’t go in too far and make sure it’s the right length. Obviously, we want to start her on the right-hand side for these tiles and put them down, going from right to left because each tile goes right. You will need an angle, grinder disc cutter with a diamond blade to cut these tiles to match the roofline.
These tiles, I managed to pick up second hand, has to come from somebody on eBay considerably cheaper than the local reclamation in the yard, but that’s also an option. I did take a while to pick them up, transport them, and clean them up with a jet washer. So it’s up to you, with you buy new or not probably if I were doing it the next time I would seriously or more seriously consider buying new tiles because they’re actually cheaper than the reclaim tasks.
In this case, these tiles by Molly are no longer made. I think they’re called double bold or something. They do match the rest of the house, which is quite lovely, the colors a bit different now they’ve all been cleaned up over the years because it’s going to take me a while to get these tiles up. And as you can see, it’s now raining to maintain reasonably good waterproofing of the roof. I’ve sealed up the felt against the wall with the polymer sealant; I’m sure nobody, no, no other roofer would probably bother doing it. At least it means, if you get a downpour, that the waters not going to hit the wall and pour in the roof pasture felt.
The flashing
Alternatively, you could cut in your lead flashing as one of the next jobs do. We shall divert rain onto the felt as well. I’m going to do that after I’ve got the tiles up there so that I can more accurately see the height at which to cut in the lid. So the building regs officer has passed or allowed me just to, but a cut in the wall of an inch or two in which to insert the lead flashing code for describing the thickness of the lead. Ordinarily, if you’re building a new house, if they’re very strict, they will insist on a leg tray. So basically, that is the lead going through the wall for the slight little on the inside, so that any water penetration in the wall hits the tray and is diverted to the outside.
Fortunately, he’s allowed me just to cut into the wall, but the lead falsely seal it with a sealant suitable for later like some stuff called lead mate, our jumper some links in the video description for things like that. So that is almost a lot easier, and don’t really want to disturb the structure of the original wall, which he has also agreed. There’s the best thing to do and to secure the tiles in position. You want the galvanized nails hammered through the mounting hole of the right length, so they can go into the pattern without going too far, and penetration of felt course you might find. The concrete is a little bit blocked; need to give it a slight tap to get it through the hole. So here’s a bit of progress with me starting to tile the roof.
As you can see a couple of rows, I’m trying to keep it even all the way around so that it puts the same pressure on the roof, and obviously, as you get to the edge, you need to make some diagonal cuts in the trials for which a nine-inch disc cutter is pretty essential, with a diamond cutting blade and, as you get to the edge will be odd little sections of tile like these bits. Here, that’s it’s impossible to like match on to the back knees.
I’m not sure what building professionals use is I’ll use some pink grit adhesive this stuff. I ever build just a better Abi’s down with the tiles join to hold it temporarily. Until we get around to putting some multiple mounting the ridge style, we shall also keep the sections of Italian glass. The other thing worth mentioning is that I didn’t know every single tiling because if your nail position is on the batten, where it’s not near a roof joist, you can get quite a lot of bounce on the baton, which makes it challenging to get to nail.
So what I’ve done is just put nails in where it’s close to a pattern, to get a much firmer connection between the pin and the batten, and it doesn’t bounce, and it goes in better looks things. A lot of people don’t actually bother using nails anyhow because all of these tiles, which were secondhand from another roof, none of the holes had a big knock through, which implies that never had any nails and, interestingly, and also a terrible overlap. You can see here the effect of weathering as the regional tile.
That’s the weathering, which means the overlap, was there, so virtually no overlap over the nail position, which is not acceptable and contrast. They sort of overlap. I’ve got a lot more, as you can see here. So, what’s at about 10 centimeters or so at least so as you’re progressing up, the roof is probably a bit easier to lay them out diagonally as you get towards the top, and because you need a ladder to be safe, getting higher up. You can’t just about clamber on them depending on the tile, but these newer ones are a little bit slippery nailing.
Be careful with the ladder
The ladder doesn’t slide away at the bottom. You see there I’ve stopped it conveniently positioned that far away, I’m jammed it with some tar sliding away from this sort of angle of ladder. It’s very likely that the ladder will slide out from that not in this with this ladder, but with a non-wooden. One did actually happen earlier, bruised a couple of my ankles, so learn from my mistakes. So that is all of the roof tiles in position and, as you can see, I’ve cut along the edge as well and just getting ready to fit the hip tiles, which we need to start off with this hip iron, which is basically just a piece of galvanized metal screwed on to the hip, and the next thing is to mix up some mortar to basically concrete in the hip tiles and fill this gap.
Fill where it joins to the tiles that side as well, and as you can see here, I started to fill the Big holes with broken bits of tile, and I can either do this when you mix up the concrete and mix it with the sorry, mortar or as I’ve done here, is to pre-fill the holes and then bit the mortar on top.
I think this is the usual way people do it from what I’ve seen from other ruse moves I’ve dismantled previously. I did mix it up with the mortar, but in the same time, as laying the tile this time, I pre-fitted them the reason for basically doing That is to stop the mortar just falling down this big hole disappearing sitting on top of the felt losing a lot of mortar and stressing out the felt.
The other thing I’m going to do is to tie the string to the top, where I think the top tile will be sitting, and then tie it on to this hip here hand you’ve got a nice straight level line to line up guitars against, because what will be very noticeable if these hip tiles either start going off an angle from left to right or, if they’re not sitting completely in a line.
As you see the roof from a side angle and as you can see here, I’ve actually be cemented between the gaps in the roof tiles – that’s right this way around this time because it makes it less susceptible for the mortar to drop down in between the gaps of the tiles, got. No worries about tapping in the hit tiles and so on might be a little bit more time consuming, and most people would probably do the mortaring of the hip time in one go.
But the vantage of doing the mortaring in two stages is going to be slightly more waterproof because the water between the hip tiles will actually crack over the years. And if the mortar is in two layers, then it’s more unlikely that crack will penetrate all the way. Through down into the felt, here’s that guidewire from hip iron to a piece of wood attached to the top
And that’s all that’s the hip tiles underneath this, and it’s reasonably straight, and it gives you an excellent guide weight hip on setting the height and the direction. So all goes in a straight line for mixing up the mortar. We want a bag of cement. Three bags of sand after the two of building sand and one of the sharps and slash grit, that’s recommended to firm up the mortar a bit more because the mortar is quite thick for these particular tiles, and you also want a plasticizer, and this one is a plasticizer, combined with a waterproof ER plus size,
That makes the mortar a bit more sticky and workable and makes a little more pleasant to work with sticks to whatever you’re more chewing up, and I’m also going around a bit of coloring. So follow the recommendations on the tin. For how much to add a bit of red and a bit black, it’s up to you what color is the cement mixer is pretty useful. You can mix it by hand, but it’s a fair bit more work, and there’s quite a lot of auto we’re going to use doing hip tiles useful to have a smaller bucket to measure out the quantities as well to keep it in that three to one.
Also, an excellent way to bunk up your motor is this measure all of your old unused, broken tiles, ultimate sour filleting, the first five tiles just a sponge to clean up where the cement has gone up to the edge of the tiles vestiges before it sets To hot and then we can ensure that you’ve got a reasonably neat edge down the side of the tiles without any cement, stains, destroying the look of it and keeps the edges somewhat neat.
So that’s the hip tiles done took about a day a long day to do those hip tasks only me on the job, doing the mixing and getting the materials as well working till it got dark, please enough, with the result straight enough, when the tiles I did Find it helped to put a little dot on each tile in the same place to indicate the center. You can use that dot to align the tile to your wire, that’s going from your hip iron down to the top, and then it keeps them in a straight line.
So I didn’t have much time to do any videoing at that stage, But it’s relatively straightforward. All you’ve got to make sure of, Are you impact plenty of mortar at each end, and of course, you know spare a bit down the middle as well, but this bit around this part of the tile underneath the joint is the most critical and that has that Should be packed with mortar. Because if you get any water going in the crack, then you want to make sure that it’s stopped there, hopefully, diverted to the edges, rather than finding its way down to the felt underneath. It’s up to you how you do the top tile. I chose to have a little bit of an overhang as the left-hand side has been giving them.
The first bit of lead fit it and to hold in place. While we do the rest and before we provide the lead silicon sealant, you keep it secure in place by little bits of lead, as you can see here. So so three times fold a bit of lead just hammered into place, and then on the next Base, we’ll make sure it overlaps by at least ten centimeters, and that’s the lead slotted into the wall.
We’re cutting the bat inch and a half, or so one or two inches, and they let slaughtered in their meter at a time. And then, as you can see, seals with a great cut of silicon sealant, especially for sealing blade, often called a lead mate or something but a few links in the video description for that sort of stuff and other tools, and so now it will finish. The gutter is relatively straightforward to face a very slight slope from one end to wearing drains around the corner and it, but about some millimeters difference between one end and the other didn’t want it.
So looking to not straight from a distance, and now it’s all ready for signing off by the building inspector, and that’s it from her. This is for the rest of the house, or the see a different shade because those cleaned up tiles cleaned up a lot redder. The house, once I can’t go to the same color so similar color, and that was just a simple matter of adding chlorine onto the tiles spraying on scraping off any moss on the end up being the same colors out to see another video mine on how to Renovate roof tiles, and that’s it thanks for watching…
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