An Illustrated Guide To Building A Shed Roof

The roof is maybe the most important part of every outdoor shed. Without a good, secure and water resist roof your shed is going to experience water leaks and can quickly start to rot and fall apart.

There are several main types of shed roofs:

• Gable and Cross Gable
• Flat roof
• Mansard gable roof
• Hipped
• Pyramidal
• Shed style roof
• Gambrel
• Saltbox
• Barn style shed roof

All the types of shed roofs have their history and reasons to be choosen. But realization of most types is technically very similar. For this reason in this guide I'll show you how to build one of the simplest roofs - the gable shed roof.

 At this point I assume you have already build the rest of your shed. If you are just starting, you have arrived at the wrong guide. Learn how to build a shed foundations first.

Now, let's get to work. You need four stable beams that should be placed on the top of the shed like shown on the picture below. Assuming your shed walls are abotut 2-3 inches thick, your beams will need to be 4 inches thick.

Use bolts or nails with glue to fix the beams very stable.

 The Gable roofs have a simple construction of horisontal and vertical beams. On the picture below you will see only a part of your roof for simplicity. Exactly at the middle of the frontal horizontal beam there is a vertical one, perpendicular to it.

Your roof will look the same way on the other side. On the top, there is one more horizontal beam that connects the two verticals.

 The roof now needs diagonal rafters which will support the plywood, plastic or whatever coverage you choose for the roof.

See carefully how each rafter has a diagonally cut stopper at the bottom. This will ensure maximum stability.

 This step is very important. The rafters need to be attached carefully to form a robust construction of triangles. This is a very unbreakable shape!

Make sure that there is rafter on each side exactly in front of the opposite one. See the picture for more clarity.

 Your construction is good and stable. You can add even more horizontal joists, but it's good enough as is. Now all you need to do is to get pieces of thick plywood, plastic or sheet iron and cover the roof.

That's it! For more cool guides like this, visit my site with tutorials and guides for building a shed.