Not too much of a post here, but worth noting. This post will not adequately convey the amount of effort put into the events covered, the ratio of effort to post length here is quite high.

So, the garage. When I moved in, I noticed that there was a broken rafter. Huh, interesting. We added a temporary stick brace.

Just out of curiosity, I decided to read up on rafter spacing building codes. It seems like most places have 12, 16, or 24″ rafter spacing, and mostly 2x6s because New England. I decided to measure the garage for kicks. The spacing was a little bigger than code:

Not 24 inches, nope.

Not 30, still nope.

Uhh, 36 inches? nope… wait what? Yep, bigger.

40? What?

NOPE- A whole 48 INCH SPACING. WHAT?? And to seal the deal the rafters were 2 BY 4S! Granted, the old style, actually 2″ x 4″ beams, but still. Everyone I told this to was incredibly surprised that the roof hadn’t caved in. Except that it had, or at least started to: one rafter was actually broken and most of the others were seriously sagging. So.. time to install some new rafters. I actually did some math out on this one, and found that the beams would hold the shingles plus one guy plus some snow with a safety factor of two, but that the slats would be pretty near breaking with a guy plus some snow. Kind of scary- its a miracle this place hasn’t caved in.

Anyways, what follows is some pics of what we did. The basic process was to cut the new 2×6 rafter to length, put it up there, jack it up so that it took the load (and un-sagged the saggy roof), and then install some plywood collar ties. This process was pretty time consuming, but did eventually work pretty well.

Above: jacking the rafters before adding the collar ties.

After a long time:

Yay! Now the roof is less likely to collapse… but it still leaks. Read on for more details.