Bending Metal
When I got the idea from my daughter Carolyn to build a playhouse on my back hillside, I was sent pictures of the Ithaca Children’s Garden structure that gave her the idea in the first place. The small structure had thick stucco or adobe walls, a small rounded door in front and another two on the sides, and a planted green roof that was arched with large eve overhangs that made it look like it was a home nestled in some hillside. It was that feature and the rounded door more than anything else that made me start calling my version of that structure a Hobbit House. The pictures on sees of the homes in the Shire where the Hobbits live share the round door and the look of being built into the hillside. That green roof is a critical element of the whole look and feel. That would be particularly so for where I wanted to position the playhouse since its downhill from the house and one looks down onto the roof from the deck, the dining room and the guest wing. That also meant that I needed to design this playhouse with special added attention to the green roof and all aspects of it.
There was the issue of getting the arc of the roof right, choosing the right kind of plants to put on it, how the plants would bear up under the sunny, unshaded spot they would enjoy, and the edge trim that would keep the soil and plants on the roof. The Ithaca Children’s Garden model gave a clear sense of the proper arc, but the rest would require my own customization. The plant matter being used in Ithaca would not match the plants best able to provide the lushness, color and easy maintenance that I would need, so I was always going to be on my own on that. The same would apply to the irrigation. But the edge trim should have been easy to replicate. The problem was that the folks in Ithaca are more “earthy” than I want to be and they used simple fascia board for the bed trim. I’m sure it looked fine when it was put up, but they made the decision to not stain or finish the wood trim on the house, so the more recent pictures made that roof fascia board look rather worn and sad and that just didn’t seem right for what was supposed to be a magical and whimsical playhouse.
I originally thought that if I got a gutter company to come and put up the trim, it would be fine to use powder-coated aluminum and I know that stuff gets bent to fit on the spot, so I imagined it being pretty cost-effective. Last summer I had metal parapet caps made and put on all the house and garage rooftop parapets. From that I got a sense that this would be an easier and affordable job. All I had to do was find a guy, so I started calling around. The first and only guy to call me back was my German friend Hans who said he only worked in copper, even though his online ad suggested otherwise. He immediately told me it would probably be on costly for a playhouse and that was a red flag to this aesthetically-oriented bull. I went to his shop in San Marcos, which was like going back in time 75 years. He immediately convinced me that he was an old-world craftsman and they he knew exactly what was needed. I also imagined that a nice copper roof trim would really add a touch of class to the structure, since I wasn’t planning anything else fancy or high-end. I felt like it would make a statement while matching some other copper sculpture I already had on the hillside. So, I placed the order.
While I struggled cutting the five beams exactly as I had wanted to (jig saws don’t do a great job on 4” thick lumber), I began to realize that those roof edges might not be quite as uniformly even as I would like and the copper edge trim might prove very handy to cover up some irregularities. I’ve always liked the expression of putting lipstick on a pig and this little Hobbit House was quickly turning into my little piggy. I kept telling people who came to do this or that about why we didn’t need to put any $200 neckties on our little pig, so just do a very basic job and don’t worry about perfection.
When the copper came I was very happy to see how wide the front fascia surface turned out to be. It was perhaps 7 or 8 inches high, which meant that it would cover a multitude of construction sins, much as my lighted garlands did on the interior wood ceiling. Ideally, this edge trim would have come in four pieces that fit together perfectly at the corners (with tabs and slots) and, as Hobbits like to say, Bob’s Your Uncle. No such luck, thank you, Hans. Hans was used to fitting out his copper work on site and the copper comes only in lengths of ten feet. That would mean that my 12.2’x14.5’ roof would need at least one added seam per side.
A few months ago I omnisciently decided to fix the roof of a cupola bird feeder by covering it with copper. That little exercise, which I could do at my workbench in the garage, was decidedly harder than I had imagined. I ended up using a lot of copper tape, which was fine for a bird feeder if you didn’t look too closely. The copper for this Hobbit House roof trim is 24-gauge sheet metal, which is .0201” in thickness. That doesn’t seem so thick on paper, but it does not cut and form so easily either. And now I had four down-sloping corners plus at least four other center seams to affix to one another. Because these corners and overlap seams are at strange angles over uneven roof planks and even more uneven roof beams, there is also some not-insignificant roof metal bending to be done.
I had noticed that what little Hans was able to do before I took over the roof trim installation, he did with specialized metal-bending tools that looked like hammer-head pliers that precisely bent the metal where and how much was needed. I’m sure that using them did not making it an easy task altogether, but at least those tools would help compared to the plier and tin-snip devices I had at my disposal. I was also working these corners and seams from up on the roof, being unwilling to risk a ladder on such precarious and uneven ground. A good fall is never a fun ride. So, consequently, the one corner and seam that Hans had done looked a LOT prettier than the others that I did with my crude tools and even more crude skillset.
Today, my local welder, Greg, came over to braze the corners and seams for me. He started on the two that Hans had done and said that he determined that he needed a few more of his tools and a different types of solder to make this work for the less perfect corners and seams that I had affixed. We agreed he would come back tomorrow to do them and that his clamps would go a long way to correct the left perfect corners I had created. I asked if he was sure that he would be able to do what was needed on these poorly crafted corners and seams and he assured me he absolutely would be. That made me feel good since it said that while I was not the metal-smithing pro that Hans was, but then I hadn’t apprenticed for many years in post-war Germany either.
I am now confident that this copper roof edge will get tightened up and be able to hold the 28 cubic feet of soil I have to put up there under the plant flats. I am glad I had the experience of doing some metal bending myself, but I am also glad that I do not depend on it for a living. It’s hard and exacting work and its always done in precarious places from what I can tell. As for the look of the copper, seeing the weld marking on the two welds already finished, let’s just say that copper has a naturally nice rainbow shine to it. In other words, it will be just fine for a Hobbit House.