No, no one’s pregnant, and this isn’t a tin roof, though I plan to build a few shacks that’ll have those. Every time I sat down to work on the cottage’s roof I heard Fred Schneider screech “You’re what?!”, followed by Cindy Wilson’s reply, and now the B-52’s will be lodged in my head overnight for the next week.
As this sad photo illustrates — I followed conventional roofing wisdom and started from the bottom up — tiling the eaves was rough going at first. My fingers were stiff enough yesterday that I shouldn’t have tried it in the first place, but stubbornness got in the way. The other problem was glue. Initially I used wood glue, which was first on the manufacturer’s list of recommendations. But the tiles have slick backs (a grittier surface would be preferable) and even the tiniest glue drops caused them to slide all over the place.
Those hijinks, coupled with my hand limitations, resulted in frustration; there was seemingly no way to place anything precisely or achieve the right overlap at the top of each tile. The eaves were annoyingly slender and I went with an overhang that can be trimmed (or popped off) later; the tiles are easy to resize and I should be able to improve their appearance. It was smoother sailing after switching to brush-on Loctite adhesive and today’s work was cleaner, though I still had some mishaps with dropping sticky tiles (as you can see from the occasional glue smear).
Roofing was the hardest task I faced in assembling this kit; gluing individual 1:24 tiles is difficult when you lack dexterity. But this was the look I wanted and it gave me an opportunity to take the tiles for a test drive. I’ll need a slate roof for my house replica project and the British hobbyist who makes these terracotta tiles offers an attractive line of slate products. It’s the same material painted differently and should work well for my purposes.
Next up is the lighthouse itself. Once that’s configured I’ll know how to decorate the cottage’s interior. Finally, I’m mortified to have committed two errors (since corrected) in my recent shout-out to The American Look: How It Can Be Yours. There’s no ‘and’ in the title and it was published in 1984, not 1987. I noticed this while flipping through it today in search of questions to ask Crankenstein, who agreed to discuss it for a special Crankcast if we have time this week.
In the past it’s been hard for me not to laugh when interviewing her because she always looks so earnest and thoughtful as I ask the dumbest questions. When we discussed Stalked by My Doctor and her love of morbid Celtic and Appalachian folk songs, she was fielding interview requests from journalists in several countries. They wanted to discuss a paper she’d published and here I was with unfettered access, asking ridiculous questions like “So, did they teach you not to kidnap patients or did everyone pretty much already know?”
I’ll try to keep the chuckling in check if we’re able to chat about The American Look, but it’ll be hard if she’s again in professional mode as I ask “Would you agree that soft jerseys and knits make for fresh-looking, comfortable clothes that can take you from a business meeting to an al fresco lunch?” or “How much time do you devote each week to the conditioning of your eyelashes?”