On our house plans, I spec'd out some roof brackets (corbels) for the house. Most of these are decorative only, but give the house a nice Craftsman look. No problem, Darlene (Richard Berg's former associate) drew some up from a corbel I saw online. Turns out that there are 24 on the house (why not, its just money). For some reason, Home Depot doesn't stock these, so it looked like an extra week to build them. This was starting to be a small construction project of its own. I asked one of my cooking group buddies—Jim Quandt—if he wanted to take on this little job. Jim retired from Weyerhauser last year and started his own little home-repair company called Jim's Tool Time. (Funny, he doesn't look anything like Tim Allen.)No problem said Jim, should take about
a week (~$1k) plus materials.
The corbels go on the gabled ends of the roof, where fake rafter tails (2 ft long) support the roof overhang. We have 4 large gables (main house) and 2 smaller ones, one each over the garage and upstairs bedroom. That accounts for 16 corbels. Then there are 2 each for the porches (shed roofs) and 3 for the pergola (a Nancy item). I drew up a model on the computer, refined it a bit, then re-sized it for each application. For example, the 2 corbels for the front porch needed to be 45" long (top dimension), whereas the regular gabled roof ones are only 24" long. The first two arrived last week and I bolted them up on the back porch. Looked great, so Jim started on the remainder of them. The remainder arrived today, so there will be some painting to do. I'll put up the front porch ones next, then work my way around the house. I'm beginning to wonder how I'm going to hold them up when I drill and bolt them to the house. On the back porch, I just used a 12' 2x4 to prop them up, but the ones on the second floor, back side are 25 ft up in the air. Looks like I'll need a space crane and sky hook for this job (honestly, anyone have an idea on this?).
Jim built the corbels out of doug fir (cedar was too soft and expensive). They are mostly 4x stock with 2x4 lateral supports. For the large ones on the front porch he used 4x6 overhead, 4x4 on the verticals, and 4x4 on the laterals. I suspect that these will weigh 60 pounds each; luckily there is massive timber in the wall to bolt these into.When all the corbels are up, we'll celebrate with a bottle of Korbel Brut, America's America's favorite bottle-fermented champagne. Korbel for Corbels, sounds appropriate. Lets not have any comments about launching this little ship, Cooley.
