Part I - The first step: Removing the Tin roof

October, 2008

The first step in tearing down the old cabin is to remove the old tin roof. Tin roofed houses are a Texas mainstay, but such roofs were not really affordable for ordinary people until the 1890s or so. Most old houses, therefore, were retrofitted with tin roofs.

Rather than go through the time and effort of tearing off the old wooden shingles that houses had used since Medival times, homeowners instead just put up the tin on top of the old shingles for an extra layer of protection from the elements.


For reasons which will become apparent later, I estimate the date of the tin roof on this house to be around 1910 or later. As you can see in the photo above, the roof - which once was silver-colored and tight-fitting - has fared poorly over the ages. But it has done its purpose - to keep the rain out - and if it had not been well-built when it was put on, the building would be in much worse shape today than it is.

In tearing down an old building - which you must do in this case to move it - the key is to disassemble it in roughly the reverse order it was put together. Although I was able to take off a few side boards on the structure, in general, I could do little until the roof was off. So that is step one.

In this phase I was assisted - as I will be for much of this project - by my brother Ray, who has infinitely more construction and destruction experience than I do. Here he is starting to take off the tin on the back side (the section previously uncovered was done so by the wind over the years).


I climbed atop the house with one crowbar to pry at the top of the tin while Ray pried on the bottom from the ladder. The pitch of the roof is very steep on the back, and less so on the front. Even so, it was very tricky to move around. The tin gave you nothing to grab onto if you should slip. Until you got to the peak of the roof, which you could either hold onto with one hand, or straddle like a horse. The latter, while not entirely comfortable, gave me the best stability.

Yee Haw!

Stacking the tin neetly to the side. It's too old and full of small holes to re-use on my new roof. Not sure what I'll use it for, but even rusted tin may one day have a use.

Once I got some of the tin off, it exposed the wood shingles beneath, which was a much better surface to work on. My combat boots - the same ones I wore in Iraq - gripped the wood well, and instead of slipping and sliding, I had a relatively stable platform from which to work. I still wasn't sure how much of the roof to trust. Beneath the shingles were some 1-inch thick cypress boards nailed to the rafters. I tried to spread out my surface area over the largest spaces possible, which both reduced slippage and made it less likely I'd fall through the roof.

Finally, the tin is off! I stand atop the stump of an old hackberry tree that was growing on the edge of the building. (Birds eat hackberry fruit, birds sit on edge of building, birds crap - hence the buidling was ringed with new hackberry trees).


The back of the house, with the tin off.


The front. Looking at this with the tin gone, I was impressed by how much better it looked. The old wooden shingles give it a kind of ginger-bread house look. Still covered by dirt and debris, the image is not sharp, but the shingles give it a handsome appearance nonetheless. I decided right then and there that the new building will not have a new tin roof - as I had originally planned - but a shingle one. Although wood shingles are hard to come across and are highly flammable, they make synthetic ones that look virtually identical.

The debris that I found between the tin and the shingles. A mixture of old leaves from the trees which used to engulf this house, acorns left by squirrels and rat droppings. Mmm. Yum.



I've swept the top part with a broom, so you can see the difference between the clean shingles (a relative term because they're literally impregnated with dirt) and the ones still covered by debris.

For some reason, the old roof had two open spaces on either side (which had been blocked by the tin). I'm guessing this was nothing more than a primitive sky light.

The wooden shingles. Wood shingles - or shakes, as they're often called - were generally made out of cedar, as these are. Note how well worn these are - they were on the building for a very long time before the tin was added on top of them. You can see that the wear is uneven. The sections covered by the overlapping shingles above are often in perfect condition, but the portion exposed is reduced to about 2/3 of its original thickness due to erosion and little rivers and valleys are carved out of the wood by decades of rainfall.

Next step: Remove the shingles.