No sooner than we were done with the SIPs, the trusses for the flat roof arrived. The design called for 16" open-web joists on 16" centers to accommodate for snow falling from the pitched roof. The canopy at the entrance of the retail section was built with "glulam" beams which are strips of wood glued together. Paul wanted the canopy to depth to be minimal so we used 9.5" glulam beams and doubled them up. Complete structural overkill but I won't have to worry about snow load. We had to slope the roof towards scuppers at opposite ends of the roof. This is usually done with custom made insulation which is costly. I had a similar problem when building my house 15 years ago. To create the slope then, my dad calculated how to rip wood studs for reach truss. He did the same calculation for the 48 trusses on this new flat roof. Neal was tasked with the difficult job of cutting down the studs with his table saw. It took him three tedious days. The moment Neal delivered the pieces, Perry got to work nailing them to the tops of the joists. After covering 10 joists, we could see the slope emerge.
As I was passing Perry pieces I stupidly stepped on a piece of plywood that wasn't sitting properly on the joists. I fell but luckily for me I'm thicker than the 16" joist spacing so I ended up getting stuck between two joists with only a few bruises. After installing the sloped pieces, we sheathed the roof with plywood and finished the parapet wall.
