The Den of Slack

When I bought the Turret House, it was already shingled except for the left side of the small gable. The builder had marked off rows 3/8″ apart and left instructions to “leave space” at the left side and overhang the shingles by 1/8″ at the right side.

The house came with a spacer for the side where they said to leave space. It’s about 1/8″.

The dormer on the side of the house also has the 1/8″ space between the shingles and the siding. This made the painting and staining easier, so maybe that’s why they did it, but I decided to run these shingles right up to the side of the house.

As for the overhang, last week I added 1/8″ trim to the front of the gable, so I just needed to install the shingles flush with the trim. This is good, because I don’t think my overhang would have been as neat.

I was intimidated to do these shingles, because the builder did a very neat job and I wanted my shingles to match. I often have trouble with the second row of shingles sticking out more than they should, because the first layer that they’re overlapping is flat against the house instead of slightly angled like the rest of the rows. I noticed that the builder had put a little piece of wood under their first row of shingles so they stick out from the house.

I decided to try this. I also cut down the first row of shingles so they would start at the line the builder had drawn.

The second row overlaps nicely. I think this is partly from the spacer under the first row and partly from the 3/8″ spacing between rows, which is larger than I usually do. In the past I’ve done 5/16″ and 1/4″, but the 3/8″ spacing looks nice, so hopefully I’ll remember this for future houses.

Unfortunately the builder hadn’t left instructions for how to handle the top row. This section of the roof lifts up, so the shingles can’t be glued to the edge of the opposite roof, but I thought I could glue them at the bottom with enough overhang to reach peak. But if I lined up the shingle with the top of the roof edge, this left too much of a gap at the bottom.

I stained a piece of corner trim and set it on top of the peak.

The corner trim is only glued to the side of the roof that lifts up, so the part that overlaps the stationary side of the roof lifts away when the roof is open.

Then I lined up the top row of shingles so the tops just meet the edge of the corner trim.

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Here’s where we left off last week:

Two things were bugging me. One was that gold trim on the front edge of the porch roof. For some reason I had thought it would be MUCH easier to paint the edge of the porch blue, since the surfaces were also blue. But as soon as I saw that gold trim up there I knew the blue andmsl the gold had to be the other way around. The other was the gold corbels over the fishscale shingles, but I had decided to let those sit to see if they grew on me.

Ripping the gold trim off was easy. I painted over the edge with gold, which only took one coat.

Painting over the gold trim was a little more difficult. It has a grainy texture and even with a few coats it seems more muted than other blue elements. But I think it looks much classier this way. After gluing it on, I went over the top and bottom edge to cover up the little bit of gold that was showing at the seam (which of course turned out to be way less work than painting these twice was).

Next I masked off the quarter round at the bottom of the bay window and filled in the gaps to paint over them.

And somehow I hadn’t noticed these huge gaps in the crown molding I glued over the entry peak.

Wood filler to the rescue!

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