Some one has said that if a woman’s feet, hands, and head are well and appropriately clothed, the balance of the dress may be plain and simple, and yet she will have an elegant appearance. So, if a house has a good foundation and a suitable and well-placed roof, the balance of the outside may be extremely plain and yet it will be beautiful. Some of our modern houses rest on unpointed, poorly constructed, and narrow foundations, are bedecked with peaks, pigeon lofts, and dog-eared cornices, and remind one of the suspenderless, barefooted darky crowned with a cast-off silk hat.
If the foundation is too small and shabbily built, no amount of paint and cornice can relieve the house from a look of shabby gentility. A few brown or cream-colored stones or bricks, when placed on the outside of the foundation where it shows above ground, will give dignity, beauty and a substantial look to the whole house. It may do for it what a nickel does for one’s shoes.
The roof of the farm house, and for that matter of all other houses, should, in the trying climate of America, have an ample projection. An abbreviated cornice may be admissible if the building is constructed of stone which is of sufficient density to resist the American tooth of time. [Fig. 76] shows a section of an abbreviated and a well extended cornice. The house which has this short-cut cornice stands within a few hundred feet of the one with the wide projecting eaves. During the past twenty years it has been necessary to paint the former twice as often as the latter.
Fig. 76. Deep and narrow cornices.
The roof covering would better be of slate or tiles, for the time has passed for building temporary, make-shift houses, though they might have served their purpose well in a new and rapidly developing country. With rare exceptions, the houses to be built in the future should be permanently located, well built, and of durable material. The slates which compose a roof should be not more than 8 inches wide and should not be put on roofs of less than one-third pitch, since they are only double-lapped and do not lie as closely, one upon the other, as do shingles, which are laid triple-lapped. Slate and tile roofs are comparatively heavy, and hence require stronger roof structures than shingles.
The roof boarding for slate roofs should be matched—tongued and grooved—and covered with paper to prevent cold and draughts of air from passing into the attic. Since slates, on account of their somewhat rough surfaces, do not lie closely together, the wind is likely to pass through the cracks in the roof, if there are any, and carry snow and rain into the upper part of the house; therefore the roof covering immediately under the slates should be virtually air-tight. The roof boards for a shingle roof should be narrow and laid with openings of from 1¹⁄₂ to 2 inches between the boards. Rain and snow seldom drive up and through the shingle roof, and since wooden roofs are more likely to rot out than to wear out, the more perfectly the shingles are dried out after a storm the better. The narrow roof boards and the spaces between them allow the shingles to dry quickly, and therefore are better than matched boards.
The short, or common, shingle of commerce is 16 inches long, ³⁄₈- to ¹⁄₂-inch thick at one end, and ¹⁄₈ of an inch at the other, and is computed at 4 inches wide. A bunch of shingles contains one fourth of a thousand. It should have 25 double courses and the band should be 20 inches long. Not infrequently there is a course or two wanting, or the bands are an inch or so short. Having this data, one can easily determine if the bunch is of legal size. A little cheating is not uncommonly done by placing the shingles in the bunch loosely. This can be detected by examining the bunches at the thick ends of the shingles.
Theoretically, 1,000 shingles should cover 10 feet square, or 100 square feet, known in carpentry as “a square,” if the shingles are laid 4 inches to the weather. Since shingles are usually laid 4¹⁄₂ to 5 inches to the weather, 1,000 shingles should cover about 120 square feet. Two-thirds of the lower part of the roof may be laid 4¹⁄₂ inches, and the upper third 4³⁄₄ or 5 inches to the weather, if the roof is not flat.
If shingles are treated with lime water or diluted gas tar, or be painted as they are laid, the life of the roof may be prolonged. The painting of roofs with tar or common earth or mineral paints, after they are laid, does little or no good in preserving them. Sometimes painting is resorted to to make the roof harmonize with the color of the sides of the building.