Recently, my company was asked to build a shed dormer in the rear part of an attic to create a pair of bedrooms and to make the attic space more usable. Removing the old roof and framing the dormer was doable, but as a small company that rarely uses framing subcontractors, we had a couple of concerns.
Hatching a Plan
The primary consideration was how quickly we could get the existing roof demolished and the new one dried in. We’d be working in August, and here in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., thunderstorms are almost daily events. I wanted to have the house open to the weather as little as possible, and without a large framing crew, we would run a high risk of exposing the interior of the house to rain. Our solution—hinging up the existing roof—would allow us to keep a mostly weathertight roof over the house at all times. To cover open areas during construction, we planned to supplement with tarps that we could deploy quickly.
A secondary, but still important, consideration was cost. Raising the existing roof to the new pitch would save us more than $1,000 in framing material compared with building the dormer from scratch. As an added benefit, we would keep all the old—but perfectly good—material out of the landfill. The engineer we consulted was on board with using the existing 2×8 roof framing. So we just needed to figure out how we were going to get it done.
