Lets Talk Roofs

I agree. my cabin has a metal roof with a full 45 degree angle. it still can have a couple of feet of snow on it. In northern quebec one winter we have a total accumulation of 14 feet.

 

Thankfully snow isn't anything I have to deal with but I was raised on the Gulf Coast of Texas and we had LOTS of rain and the potential for Hurricanes. Your roof needed to be flatter so as not to catch the wind in a storm but you also have to use what we called hurricane hangers on our ceiling joists and rafters and longer nails on the roofing. A hurricane hanger is a sort of sheet metal piece of double angle iron that makes a rock solid connection between the headers and the joists and then from the joists to the rafters.

Once again this is one of those things that is extremely area specific. I know what we do here. I've actually done some framing and roofing for a living myself. I am extremely happy that I never had to work on one of your northern steep a$$ roofs!!!

 

Yes i get it it is sort of like a joist hanger in reverse . I worked construction also. Up on baffin island we would run steel cables over the top and anchor the houses down .

 

Roofing more than any other part of home construction is a very localized sort of thing. I was raised in a house with an almost flat roof. You covered it with tar paper then poured liquid hot tar down then another coat of paper then another coat of liquid tar with a layer of pea gravel put on top of this while the tar was still hot and soft. These roofs were great and almost impervious to wind damage. They lasted about 25 years at which point you scraped the pea gravel off and just did the tar on the roof and replaced the pea gravel.

I saw someone that tried to do the tile roof like is common in the west. It was great until the next hurricane!!! Those tiles became projec"tiles"! They just didn't know what was eventually going to come. If it had been in the City they wouldn't have allowed it.