A Roof in the Garage

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John, the talent behind our pond, said I should build the roof in my barn, to which I responded “We don’t have a barn.” His idea was to bring over a bunch of guys and hoist the finished product up onto the poles. Instant pagoda!*

I didn’t think it could work, and in retrospect I was really really right. Still, the idea of getting started on the ground, using our garage in lieu of a barn, made some sense. We had our drawings, but they were not complete and there were lots of details we knew we needed to work out. Angles, layers, ridges and tiles were all left to the imagination from our planning to date. The Chinese wall I had built had a roof which ended up looking pretty good, but it was a short and stubby one. Still, the approach had been sensible. Fence posts!

 These were the material from which the wall’s roof had been constructed and exactly what I had in mind for the superstructure. In this case I needed posts without holes drilled in them, so I figured I would need to go to a fence supply company and see what my options were. First though, I thought I would check out Lowe's – if they had anything useful it would definitely be cheaper. I didn’t go to Home Depot because I thought I knew what they would have (8’ pressure treated line, corner and end posts) and I was not sure about Lowe's.

When I arrived I found some nice 9’ cedar posts. Again line, corner and end, but there were several blanks (no holes drilled) mixed in amongst them. That was what I wanted, and I figured I could at least bring down my average cost by taking what they had before going to the fencing place to get the rest. I was stuttering and indecisive because I wasn’t sure if I would find a match, so I decided to wander around some more. In a different section, out amongst the tractors and trees, I discovered two big piles of blanks, and they were marked at $5 instead of $17. It was like winning the lottery.

I abandoned the plan to use thinner posts for the top part of the substructure, computed how many  of the 9' posts I would need, added two a couple of times to be sure, and loaded them up on a cart. After I paid for them I couldn’t get them all to fit into the car, so I had to leave half my load and come back for it - no problem.

The supporting poles would be set 5 feet apart on center, and I started with the hexagon that would sit atop them. To do that I wanted to leave a foot beyond the center on each end – so I needed 7 foot posts. I used the extra 2 feet from each post as legs for the temporary roof construction. Making angled half lap joints was a bit tricky, and I didn’t do a particularly clean job, but the rest of the support construction went pretty cleanly.
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Of course I would have to move what I built, get it out of the garage and put it up on top of the poles. Since, despite John’s suggestion, I planned to do this by myself it meant I would need to be able to disassemble what I did in the garage and reassemble it in place. To make this easier I numbered the main pieces.







The trickiest part was getting the Thunderpole to hang right. It was supported by angled short posts running up from the smaller upper hexagon. Originally I planned to carve indents into the Thunderpole itself, but after burning out my router in the effort I gave up on that idea. Still, if this was challenging in the garage I knew it would be tough when done in place.

The biggest purpose of the garage buildout was to be sure that the angles looked right, and try to decide on the roof tiles – that we would simulation with, you guessed it, more fence posts. The original plan was to use something significantly smaller than the posts we were using for the structure, but when we laid those out side by side with the thicker ones we no longer wanted the smaller diameter posts
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So I loaded up my car with the thin posts and headed back to Lowe's to return them, and see if they had any of the blank cedar posts left. My luck was with me and I got two more carfuls of the cedar blanks. But the price had changed, this time around they were $1 each. In the end, I did have to buy 7 more end posts and carefully hide the holes to finish the roof. Those 7 posts actually cost me more than the original 40 or so had.

So there it was, a little spaceship in my garage. I was a little reluctant to take it out, not sure if it would go back together again and look as good. In the end I knew what I had to do though, and pressed on. It was also nice to have a place to put the cars.

Next: Reaching for the sky.

*While technically what we built is called a pavilion, I almost always refer to it as a pagoda in conversation.