Guesstimate, or just plain lucky?

It's taken many years for me to learn how to undertake large projects by breaking things into smaller goals. Yesterday, we finished reframing the porch roof on the Latham house. That leaves me with a sense of accomplishment.

The most difficult part of doing the roof was the new hip going around the corner. The hipped porch roof was an original element to the house that had been removed during a remodel and one that we had to explore and recreate.

There are ways to calculate angles needed on the main hip beam which intersects two planes and reaches from the main house to the porch plate, but these formulas are only understood by engineers and architects. I have never met a craftsman that didn't just guess and scribe to make the beam fit correctly. The more experience a carpenter has equals directly to amount of time required to guesstimate and scribe correctly.

Here is our guesstimate beam in place and properly modeled by Jason.




And the completed porch roof frame!