RAFTER TAILS

Given my previous two posts, you might think that rafter tails are meant to be raft tales, something interesting about how our raft did or didn't float down to the Pacific ocean where it is even now being harvested by Japanese fishing boats or something. But no. This is much more mundane, and much more expensive. For those who don't know -- rafter tails are a an important decorative feature of Craftsman houses. They are underneath the eaves and they typically stick out past the eaves, somtimes to support the rain gutters, but almost always with a decorative ending on them. On our house, the rafter tails were mostly intact on the second story, but the ends of the lower ones had apparently been sawed off by a previous owner, possibly to install rain gutters, or maybe because they had dry rot. They've been that way for the 25 years we've lived here, but we decided it was finally time to get them back to what they were, as part of the housepainting job which will be the topic of a later post.

To backtrack just a bit, a couple of years ago we saw a guy standing outside our house paying a lot of attention to it, and paranoid as we are, we went out to ask him what he was doing. His name was Jeremy Boosey, and he was replacing rafter tails on a house that Herb Caen used to live in. So now it's two years later, and we're getting ready to do some big house projects (window replacement and painting) and we decide that maybe while we're doing that, we should get the rafter tails replaced. So we called Jeremy.
When you talk about replacing stuff on old houses, one of the things you run into is that lumber a hundred years ago was actually the size it said it was. So if you had a 2x4 it was two inches by four inches, instead of what it is now, which is 1-3/4 by 3-3/4 -- or maybe less. This means that you can't just put a new end piece on, and you definitely can't replace the whole thing. So Jeremy came up with the idea for a sandwich.


The plan was to make a pattern from the top rafters and glue it on to the cut off end of the rafter. Since the part of the rafter tail to be replaced is only about 5 or six inches, but it needs to be seamless, the idea is to make a sort of a sandwich. You could imagine this sandwich as the bread being a baguette, with fresh meat being at one end, and old meat being in the rest of it. The first plan was what I'd call the fat sandwich. He thought he would use some fence slats of redwood (the original wood on the house) but they ended up making the tails look too fat.
Next he tried the more American sandwich version (thin sliced white bread) which used plywood. This worked much better, because it had to be glued and bent because, remember, the new end is 1-3/4 inch thick, while the original is actually 2 inches thick. In the pictures, you see the samples of how the ends will look. But in the pictures, the "sandwich" is on the end. In the final version, the "bread" of the sandwich is about 3 feet long (going all the way back to the edge of the house) and the "meat" is about 5 inches long. Although the lower, replaced rafter tails are all a little bit thicker (about 1/4 inch) than the ones on the second story, it's so high up there that you can't really see the difference. Probably no one but us will ever even notice that these were replaced, but we think it makes a big difference. And all the rafter tails on the bottom part of the house (44, I think) are the new size. If we ever get a few days without rain, or fog, or dampness, or weather that's too cold, we will get the painting finished. Our relatively mild weather in Sacramento means you can paint a house any time of the year more or less, but a job that takes a month in the spring or early fall tends to stretch out to (as of now) about three months in the winter, with what seems to be no end in sight. But we're eventually going from a gray and white house to a Craftsman-inspired four color house, which will probably henceforth be known in the neighborhood as "the gypsy house."