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| Building a Roof for My Backyard Shed? |
| Dear Greg I'm going to be building a small shed in my backyard and would like to know, what size to make the roof rafters. Hello Simon I'm going to need a few measurements from you first. How big is the shed going to be? In other words, can you give me the outside measurements, for example most sheds are square and a typical measurement would be 8 foot by 12 foot. I also need to know what kind of roofing materials you will be using. For example are you going to rue the shed with composition, wood or tile shingles. Do you live in an area where it snows? Is the shed roof going to be flat or pitched? Hello Greg The measurements of the shed are going to be 10 x 16 and I want to have a small pitch on the roof which would come to about a half inch per foot slope. I am going to use rolled roofing as my roofing material. I live in Arizona and it rarely snows. If it does snow, it does'nt snow that much and it melts within a few days. Hello Simon  I would recommend using a 2 x 6 for your roof rafter. I'm only suggesting the 2 x 6 if you are going to run the roof rafters parallel with a 10 foot sides of the shed. For example if you are 10 foot wall is located on the north and south side of the shed, your roof rafters will sit on top of the east and west walls. If you were going to run your roof rafters in the opposite direction, parallel to the 16 foot wall, which would mean the roof row after is now are going to be sitting on the north and south walls and now will be running from east to west, I would recommend using at least a 2 x 10 roof rafter.  In each one of these cases, the roof rafters should be spaced no more than 16 inches on center. If you were to space these rafters at 2 foot on center, you could be taking a little chance. I would like to mention what the structural engineers refer to as a snow load. Let's just say that one day it snowed on your little shed roof and it snowed for a couple of days. Soon you would have a large pile of snow that could be pretty heavy. This could create a problem because you're shed roof does not have enough slope to let the snow slide off of the roof. I would recommend, watching for these conditions and removing the snow, if it ever did pile up from the roof as soon as possible. Don't forget that most cities will require a building permit for sheds that are not movable and have a roof area of over 100 square feet.
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