Roof Modification for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMLXXXVII

Roof add-on intersection

If the term "content farm" leaves a bad taste in your mouth, there's a good chance you have at one time or another found yourself burned by the freelance hacks who infested sites like eHow.com a decade or so ago. Out-of-work English majors and journalism ("communications") grads pounded out verbiage for the site at a frantic pace, contributing mightily to what we call the stupidifcation of the internet. One such self-appointed freelancer was Ciele Edwards, who took a few minutes away from her list of credit-card posts to pretend she knew enough to address the topic of "How to Connect a Porch Roof Onto Your Existing Roof" at HomeSteady.com... even though she clearly didn't.

Here's a hint, Ciele: if you need to modify your roofline, which is what the OQ was planning on doing; you need to strip the existing roof down to the rafters and structurally tie the framing of the addition to the existing structure.

Here, however, is some of what Edwards told her unwitting readers:

"Fasten a sill plate to the house in between the porch's side support beams. The sill plate lets you secure the porch's wall supports to its roof."

What??? For those of you unfamiliar with framing terminology, the sill plate rests on the foundation, not somewhere around the roof. What she means by "wall supports" remains a complete mystery. Maybe Edwards meant to say "top plate," but in reality, she just parroted some words she found in a random article also written by a different clueless freelancer

There is, of course, more:

"Position the rafters over the sill plate in accordance with the pitch of your existing roof. Secure the rafters into the sill plate with screws... Slide joist hangers over the edges of the porch roof where the rafters meet the sill plate..."

So far, this expert hasn't mentioned the existing roof. Which is just as well, 'cause the bozo most certainly doesn't know how to use joist hangers!

When all is said and done, about the only useful thing Edwards had to say was in her tip:

"Check the pitch of your home's roof to determine the pitch of your porch roof before you begin this project. Knowing the pitch of your roof before you install the rafters can save you from making a costly mistake."

We're pretty sure that the most costly mistake a reader might make would be to believe that this freelancer knew a porch roof from a hole in the ground. Between the garbled "instructions" and the list of references, it's pretty clear that our Dumbass of the Day merely performed a half-assed copy-reword-paste job on the "roof" portion of someone's guide to building a porch. There's not one word in all her bullshit about how to tie the porch roof to the existing roofline...

...which somehow doesn't surprise us.

DDIY - ROOFS