Porch Day 2

This is what the Tiny House looked like at the end of the day today. I know what you're thinking- it doesn't look that different from what it looked like at the end of the day yesterday. In fact, it looks like the only new thing on the porch at all are those three little pieces of wood against the forward wall of the house. Well, you're right. We started the day off with the realization that if we had beveled the tops of the boards which make up the edge of the box, we could lower the height of the porch roof a fraction of an inch without affecting the slope of the roof or the height of the porch's entryway. 

Why is this fraction of an inch so important? Because we're pushing things on two fronts: first, the porch is already at an 11 degree pitch. That's really shallow. Also, the distance between the top of the porch and the bottom of the window above it is only about 4 inches. In that 4 inches, we need room for the window, the metal roof, the window trim and the siding. So, yeah. We really want all the space in that gap, and to maximize the porch roof slope. 

So, we spent the day carefully dismantling the work we did yesterday piece by piece, putting bevels on the outside edges of the box, and reassembling the thing. Then we beveled and placed the ledgers. And then we ran into a brick wall. The porch roof isn't a simple shed, it's got a two hips in it where the sides slope down in a different direction from the front, and we need to have two diagonal runners from the ledgers to the outside corners of the box, they need to be beveled, with miter cuts on either side, and somehow need to be fixed at each end. 

And we have no idea how to accomplish these things. We worked into the evening trying to make the things, and eventually decided that we should just call it a night and start again in the morning. 

It wasn't a complete waste of a day, though. I got my new favorite tool from the hardware store this morning. It's called a bevel. It's crazy simple, and it allows us to scribe interior angles- meaning we can do more carpentry and less math.