Build Days 30-31: The Roof Arrives! (But Progress Slows)

So, bad news first: something (wind, I guess?) pushed the entire tiny house off the jack stands it was up on. That means the whole thing fell, probably quite suddenly (we weren't there at the time), more than a foot and a half to the ground. Three of the jack stands fell on their side, but one remained standing, and punched through the floor, as shown (this used to be a nice, smooth sheet of aluminium). Fortunately, the rocks we set behind the wheels apparently stopped the whole thing from rolling away!

Everything inside was a mess and had fallen all over the place. This picture, which captures some of the mess, is actually after a good bit of cleanup.

This is one of the culprit jack stands that apparently failed.

And here is our replacement solution: piers built out of cinder blocks (and concrete paving stones for the slightly finer height adjustment) under each corner. It seems unlikely that these could tip over the way the jack stands did.

The good news, now, is that our roof finally arrived (six weeks after ordering it, despite the original quote of one week lead time). We opted to bring it out with a rented home depot truck, which was cheaper than the last mile delivery fee from the supplier, and also let us get started right away.

The gray strip here is the "cleat", the first piece of the roof. The "eave trim" piece hooks over the cleat.

And here is the eave trim up in place over the cleat. This piece was probably one of the most challenging pieces to attach so far: it took three hours of trying and trying again. I think we attached the cleat a bit too high, which made everything slightly out of alignment. As we proceed (and for anyone else doing one of these hidden fastener roofs), a better way to ensure alignment is probably to slide the trim piece over the cleat while on the ground, then lift them both as a unit into the correct position, mark where that puts the cleat, take it all down and separate the two pieces, and finally attach them one at a time as we did above. Except that carefully marking the cleat position this way should hopefully make everything align exactly right. Since we have to perform a nearly identical process on the rake walls and peak, hopefully the experience we've gained will make the work on those sides faster and less frustrating!