Metal Roofs for the Dummy DIYer

metal roof example

It's not unusual for a staffer to be wandering the back roads of the 'net and come across a name that seems familiar. "Hey!" they think, "We've already caught this dolt contributing to the stupidification of the internet before. Wonder if it's happened again?" Lo and behold, it usually has, and this is one of those times. The article that caught our staffer's eye this time was "Metal Hip Roof Instructions"¹ at HomeSteady.com, and the name was Alexander Callos.

Callos has already graced these pages five times, including another time that he demonstrated his ignorance of roofs and roofing. Like many a contributor to eHow, Alexander apparently grabbed a bunch of "titles" with a similar subject and used the same bogus information for all of them.
According to Callos,

"A hip roof has sloping sides and ends. All of the sides of a hipped roof slope slightly downward toward a wall."

Ummm, sure, you could also say that it has no gables. But this business of "slope slightly downward toward a wall"? Well, first, define "slightly"; second, what roof slopes upward? and third, we'd be inclined to say that it slopes toward the ground instead of a wall. But that silliness from a clueless J-school grad isn't why our staffer flagged this piece of tripe...

What caught our staffer's eye is the very first step in Alexander's instructions:

"Measure 2 feet up from the bottom left-hand corner of the roof and snap a chalk line across. Metal roofing is 2 by 4 feet and will fit along the chalk lines."

Wait, what? Metal roofing is "2 by 4 feet"? That's not what your alleged references say, Alex, although to be fair, your references say nothing about the size and shape of metal roofing. Most metal roofs, however, are clad with ribbed sheet metal, usually two or three feet wide and as much as 20 feet long. Some are clad with metal shingles, but they aren't 2 feet by 4 feet.

But wait, it gets worse. According to Callos, your next step is to,

"Line up the first piece of metal roofing horizontally in the bottom left-hand corner of the roof. Hammer in roofing nails through the metal and into the sheathing underneath. Space out the nails every 2 feet around the first metal piece."

No, Alex, metal roofing is installed vertically, not horizontally; and it's installed with screws, not nails! Callos continues in this vein with such cogent instructions as,

"Set the first piece of the second row above the first row and overlap it by one ridge on the metal roof... Install lap screws on each slope of the hip roof along the bottom and sides around the perimeter..."

...clearly conflating a shingled roof with a metal roof. Not only that, but our Dumbass of the Day never even mentions the question of how to address the multiple ridgelines of a hipped roof. Small wonder our staffer decided to nominate Callos yet again!

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_7913841_metal-hip-roof-instructions.html

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