The Mansard Roof--Oh Boy!!!!

Although, I really did enjoy building this house, and I had to do several things over--usually due to not understanding the actual building process, or forgetting I was going to wire and had to take off all my wallpaper, to put it in, or just plain stupidity. I have to say this roof drove me and my husband Nuts before we got it right. In fact, there was a time that I had to walk away for 2-3 weeks and not touch this house except to play with aforementioned grandkids or I may have destroyed it.

BUT, plain old stubborness and wonderful suggestions from people on this forum, and Riley's steady hand finally paid off. The instructions are very fague on how to do this roof, something like wet and bend. Nobody wants their wooden parts to warp, except when they are suppose to B) . Well, our roof didn't even bow the tiniest little bit. I research and found where one lady wet them and tied them to paint cans. So this is what we tried again and again and again.

We had wet this so much we were beginning to think that we would rot the wood and that we would have to make a new roof, Riley finally, after I mentioned that Holly said she did her Cambridge roof by making the grooves a little deeper, took his trusty dremel and deepened the grooves and waloh it finally curved just enough to fit the supports. We were so happy we wanted to celebrate B) One of the roof supports did break straight across, it would not hold with glue alone and after waiting so long for the curved roof portions to comply, I did not want it falling in. So I use tiny pieces of scrap wood to make braces on each side. Corners where the roof meet did in our case take some putty to fill in gaps. We tied string through the bay window openings to help hold in place while the glued dried.

You can tell it still took some heavy weights to convince this roof to stay glued.

The shingles were applied once I was convinced that I wouldn't come home from work one day to find my roof had sprung across the floor from coming unglued. B)

I had originally planned on staining my shingles, another newbie mistake was made and they had to be redone. I had glued the shingles on before staining and therefore the stain did not take very well at all ;)

So I painted them using acrylic terra cotta color to more match the porch roof.