Repairing Old Sagging and Bowing Roof on Attached Cottage Garage
Repairing the old sagging and bowing roof on our attached cottage garage required a lot of diy engineering and elbow grease.
REPAIRING OUR ATTACHED COTTAGE GARAGE
Here we are back in our little pine cottage attached garage. And again, making diy repairs to it. Don’t worry~ we still have a bunch more to share and this doesn’t cover all of the repairs and renovations to it.
We are taking our time as we’re working full time jobs and also trying to salvage as many materials or make them on our own. It’s a labor of love, learning, and preserving the past as best we can.
When I say, making materials on our own, I mean like when Nate built temporary beams for our garage repairs. Why buy them when you can make them yourself! That may not be the preference for everyone and you may not necessarily have the resource of time on your side. But, this is typical for us, since we learn as we go. Figuring things out along the way.
For this project, that meant Nate had to put on his invisible engineer hat and be ready for some heavy lifting. Hey~ who needs the gym anyway when you’ve got home renovations keeping you in shape?
But don’t worry~ Nate also picked up some salvaged old beams he would use later for our garage repairs. They screamed preservation in all their old glory! It was worth the three hour drive and were only $200 bucks for four 14 foot beams. We’ll be sharing more of the outcome of our repairs with those beams in a later post.
REPAIRING OLD SAGGING AND BOWING ROOF
The real issue we are tackling in this post is the sagging and bowing roof on our attached cottage garage.
Nate had the task to repair the wooden beams that were sagging and some were even broken. He would attach new wooden planks to the old ones to straighten out the sagging. That would also repair the structure of the whole garage as well.
He used the sistering method by attaching new 2x6s to the old wooden planks or studs. When he did that you could see that it was tight at the end of the peak, but toward the peak there was a large gap.
That was an indication of the roof sagging and bowing since the new board is straight. He ended up building new rafters for the vaulted ceiling garage and sistered new wood all across the garage.
USING TEMPORARY BEAMS TO REPAIR SAGGING AND BOWING
Nate built and installed temporary beams throughout the garage. He was hoping it would straighten out the sagging. As he continued to work with it, it started to repair the sag, which was great news.
He worked really hard using a jack, temporary beams, 2x6s, and by making sure everything was very sturdy. It was a lot of work, but worth it. Progress was being made. And the results were gratifying. Still a bit more to do, but it was getting better with each task.
Now the temporary beams that Nate built could also be used as permanent beams if you wanted to also complete similar repairs. Since we purchased salvaged beams for this task, the handmade ones were purely place holders for the old beam gems we would eventually install throughout the garage.
There are many ways and opinions of how something like this should be tackled. Nate did a lot of internet research and tried out different methods. Every garage and situation is different and we hope that you find the perfect or workable solution for your needs. We continue to learn about these things daily it seems in this current renovation season we’re in.
LESSONS LEARNED
There were many lessons we learned during this whole process. As you can see, the garage has taken on quite a bit of time and repairs. It’s almost like you wonder if it would’ve been better to just tear it down and build a new garage.
That would have been more expensive for us. The way we worked it, we only repaired what we needed to and preserved the rest of the old gem. Salvaging as much as possible. This saved us money and helped us to learn some skills along the way.
I guess I could say that Nate has learned how to be engineer, carpenter, and contractor all at the same time. It was a huge task. Thank goodness for the school of YouTube and the many how to and informational videos that he learned from. I’m also learning a lot from the process editing our videos and writing blogs about them here.
It has been a whirlwind of lessons that we wanted to learn and ones we just had to learn for the sake of getting things done the best we could do them. After all~ maintaining your own property is a lot of work. Yet it’s an investment that will hopefully pay us back in the future!
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CHECK OUT OUR VIDEOS
Thanks for joining us on this journey! We hope that you will find inspiration watching us learn as we go while we’re attempting to renovate and rebuild this old small historic cottage mostly on our own~ while working full time jobs! Stay tuned for more progress updates ahead. Read more about us here.
You can also watch a video about this here.
To see more adventures of our fixer upper journey, click on the links below.
