Building a Low-Cost CLEAR Deck Roof

our back porch is in pretty rough shape it has no protection from the weather or from the sun but now that we're home all the time we want to be able to use it more this is what the porch looks like in winter the snow melts in the yard but not on the deck i don't know why this happens it probably has something to do with thermodynamics or the tilt of the earth's axis or the fact that the porch is often in shade either way it's really not working for me and even though i refinished it the surface gets weathered and cracked in virtually no time because it just has no protection the solution was a roof but it couldn't be just any deck roof it had to be the ultimate deck roof [Applause] now one of the challenges i face is that i don't have a lot of room to work with thanks to the window above a shingled roof requires a slightly steeper slope and i want to keep the roof line as high as possible to preserve the view plus shingled roofs tend to get kind of dark and murky underneath [Music] i could go with an awning but those are a liability in the winter you may remember my whole snow problem then there are these louvered roof systems that can be opened to let the sunlight in or close to provide protection from the weather they seem like a great solution but they started around ten thousand dollars and that gave me a good laugh without costing me a dime and so i searched day after day for a roof that would meet my seemingly impossible demands days turned into months months turned into years years turned into eons until finally i found this it's a clear corrugated plastic panel that can block the weather without blocking the light they're typically used in greenhouses and when used as a roof they can have a much shallower pitch while still meeting building code which is exactly what i wanted i'll talk more about this later but for now i had my solution so i came up with a minimalist design got it approved by the township and then i started ordering materials and yes i paid several hundred dollars more than i wanted for the lumber and yes i had to call five lumber yards to get everything i needed and yes some of the lumber arrived chewed and warped but i just dealt with it because i had to get this project moving i used a solid stain because it has the longest lifespan plus it helped me hide a lot of the imperfections in the lumber i did let it dry out for a couple weeks before staining which is not as long as you're supposed to wait but i had to stain it before putting it up because my clear roof meant i had to stain all four sides in the long run this hasn't caused any issues the first thing i did was to remove the siding where the ledger panel was going to be mounted on the side of the house and you'll notice that behind the siding i have the original t11 that was on my house instead of a typical house wrap and that actually made it easier when we made our markings which you'll see in a little bit i learned a lot about siding in the course of this project including the fact that i really don't like it so i could talk about it a lot but i won't you're welcome [Music] the next thing i did was to remove the decking that covered the footers because that's where we're going to put the posts that will hold up the entire roof in order to comply with the local building code i had two choices i could either dig new footers for the posts which would be a long and tedious process or i could mount them directly on top of the existing footers which would not only be faster but it would also look better now building a roof is not a one-person job so that's why i hired my friend luke luke is an apprentice carpenter and he's also like a monkey when it comes to getting around on a rooftop i made luke do all the really tricky stuff like cutting the notch into the corner channel of the siding here where the ledger board is going to go and the siding had to fit just right around it with as little gap as possible so that it could be water tight the cut had to be really precise did i mention that siding is annoying the ledger board is probably the most important piece of this entire project so here we're measuring the ends of it and then we're finding the nearest stud and we're triple checking that we're on the center of the stud because we're about to drive giant lag bolts into it and then we repeat that process for every stud of our 16 foot roof for installing the ledger board we marked off a line that would guide us in keeping it level when we would later go to install it against the house we pre-drilled all the holes for the lag bolts so they would be super easy to install once we have the board up on the wall this is a two by eight inch piece of lumber and i couldn't get one that was 16 feet long so we had to settle for two eight footers and we installed them side by side we had put some nails in the wall so we could set the board on those check the level and make adjustments before driving at home [Music] then it was time for the big boys these are six by six inch posts that were too big for the miter saw to cut all at once so we had to cut one side flip them around and then cut the other side these are 12 foot posts cut down to around 10 feet some of which will sit below the decking so we'll top out at around nine and a half feet floor to ceiling then we had to cut an l-shaped notch in the top of each post where our beams were going to sit and to be fair lou cut one and i cut one mine just took a lot longer hey you remember those footers we talked about a few minutes ago well the next day it was time to stand up our posts so we started by putting mounting brackets on top of the original footers and no we don't expect this glue to actually hold anything it was just there to provide a level mating surface for the bracket the posts were not a perfect fit so we had to slim down the ends a little bit to get them inside the brackets hard to see here but that little aluminum bracket along with the deck joist is going to anchor the post in place [Music] and just to prove i'm not a total slacker i trim down one of the posts as well [Music] once both posts were standing tall we modified the original decking so it could go back in place and then it was time for the beam the local building code requires a 2 inch by 10 inch beam to span this 14 foot gap with a little bit hanging out the end to get us to 16 feet overall it's a little excessive for the type of roof we're building but then they required us to double it unfortunately once the beams were up i noticed the problem can you see it the post on the right was about an inch and a half too high so we had to take the beam down and i held it in place while luke marked the correct level [Music] all right let's try this again [Music] [Music] next it was time to connect our beams to our ledger board that's a joist hanger so we mocked up how these joists were going to hang on a ledger board and then we added a hanger every 22 inches on center [Music] [Music] the cut we're making here is called a bird's mouth and it's the spot where the rafter will sit on the beam and the shape will prevent it from moving forward or backward [Music] each rafter has six nails securing it to the ledger board in the back and then another six nails with a hurricane clip securing it to the beam in the front [Music] at this point in the project we started getting a little bit of rain so i wanted to cover the gaps in the siding and make sure the house was protected so here i am trying to wrap the ledger board with j-channel you cut these little tabs and then you make a slot so that the j-channel can fit together and hopefully it's a water-tight seal and blah blah blah i'm talking about siding damn it well since we're here i might as well mention that you're supposed to tack this stuff up there and leave it just a little bit loose so that there's some flexibility as the siding changes temperature the house moves and shakes throughout the year i don't know it's just supposed to keep it from cracking [Music] i can't really describe to you how difficult it was putting all the siding back together without boring you to death let's just say you're trying to put a puzzle together inside of a shoe and that shoe is hanging off the side of your house [Music] all right back to the rafters now a lot of these boards were warped which meant that it was really difficult to measure exactly where the rafter was going to hit the beam we had to make a lot of these birds mouth cuts multiple times and just kind of find the right spot through trial and error this is a technique i like to call cutting three bird mouths with one chisel i enlisted my wife to help me hang the rest of the rafters and in some cases we had to use clamps to keep the board straight [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the last step before adding the roof panels was cross braces and for these we opted for a cobblestone pattern just to add a level of interest [Music] [Music] well we got the rafters in place yesterday and today of course it's raining so i'm down here in the garage to talk a little bit about this roofing material this is a polycarbonate roofing panel basically it's corrugated plastic and one of the reasons why we like it so much is because it's clear it looks a little cloudy now but it has a film on it and we'll take that off when we go to install it and even then it won't be like looking through a window necessarily but it will uh let a lot of the sunlight in and it will filter out the uv at the same time which is really important for people like me i'm extremely fair skinned i step outside for like five minutes and i burn now you can't walk into lowe's or home depot and buy this stuff off the shelf you can special order it through one of those big box stores but you can't get it in 12 foot lengths which is what i needed so in my case i had to go straight to the manufacturer working with them was really easy the cost was just about the same if not better the only thing i had to worry about was shipping because these things can only be sent via freight as you can see they can be cut with a circular saw and then we just had to take a vacuum and suckle the sawdust out of the little corrugated channels the only real downside is that these plastic panels can scuff and scratch really easily as you can kind of see here in this h channel that's designed to hold two of the panels together the panels themselves arrived with the plastic film that we tried to leave on until the very last minute but the h channels did not and so they got kind of damaged during shipping i can't get it any higher luke that's what i was saying maybe because the panels are so long they're really difficult to connect together with those dates channels so we decided to do it on the ground and then lift them into place which probably wasn't the best idea but doing it on the roof would have meant that all three of us would have needed to be up there at the same time and that just didn't feel very safe they secured with a lag bolt that had a watertight washer on it and we drove it down through the panels every two feet or so once the first panels were in place and secure it was a little bit easier to put the remaining panels on with luke working from up on the roof and me working from down below we probably could have installed them all this way but i guess we'll know better for next time [Music] so [Music] unfortunately once everything was in place we noticed this somehow we didn't get everything perfectly square so that meant a little post installation surgery [Music] i'm sure this is exactly how the professionals do it [Music] now that the roof was on i could focus on touching up all the imperfections in the wood with an epoxy based wood filler [Music] you mix it up with a hardener and then you have about three minutes to apply it before it's basically plastic and then you can sand it to a really fine finish [Music] it only needs a few minutes to dry and then you can paint it [Music] one of the corners of the beam was pretty chewed up so i basically reconstructed it with several layers of this wood filler [Music] and that was the finishing touch [Music] so [Music] let's talk numbers lumber came in at a pandemic price of 680 the roof panels were 550 with shipping hardware stain and miscellaneous stuff was 235 luke got paid 600 bucks the permit was 80 for a total of 2 145 give or take there's probably a receipt laying around somewhere that i forgot to factor in here but the point is when i calculated all this pre-pandemic it was easily under 2 000 bucks while these roof panels weren't exactly cheap they were definitely more cost effective than a shingle roof because shingles require a lot more material you've got plywood and tar paper and then the shingles themselves are super heavy this roof is engineered to hold a lot of weight but the total gross weight it's actually holding is probably less than five pounds it's been a month since we finished the roof and we've already spent way more time out here than literally ever before since we've lived in this house it's like we've got this whole new room except this one's outside yeah had a few really heavy storms come through within a few days after we finished it driving winds torrential downpour roof held up really well a couple really small leaks if you don't get the roofing screws just perfect they don't seal up right so i went up with some silicone sealed those off so we're all good there the only potential downside of a clear roof is that all roofs collect a little bit of dirt just like a thin layer of dust and with this one you can see it because it's clear but we didn't really get the roof so that you could stare up through it we more got it so that the sunlight could come down and a little layer of dust doesn't really inhibit that at all and the rain pretty much washes it away after a few days anyway so uh i can't even really say that that's a drawback you can see i've already started working on a privacy wall and that'll have its own video i'm probably going to hang some lights thinking about doing a gutter for some rainwater collection if you saw in the background of some of the other shots my yard took a beating this summer it was really hot and dry for most of the summer my yard got pretty burned out because i was working on this but i'm trying to do some natural irrigation on that next spring really happy with this and apparently i couldn't come up with a better way to end this so if you like this video please subscribe because uh it was a huge project and the video took even longer so that would be a great way to support all the projects i'm doing thank you for watching and i will leave you with this [Music] this is the last cut don't mess it up three quarters i was talking to myself i know but then you don't mess it up [Music] well it's been about it's been about a month since we finished the roof and we've already spent more time out here than ever before the dogs are barking about it uh you better believe i'm gonna be out here grilling all winter there might be snow on the roof there might not be any snow in the yard but as long as it's not on the deck this is ridiculous

Channel: Building With Blake

Views: 1,246,451

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Id: fWDzmfYztRY

Length: 20min 19sec (1219 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021