Sorry for the long delay between posts – I am still having major issues accessing my site from home. Right now it’s working, but pretty much every weekday afternoon/evening it’s inaccessible for me, which is my [TANTRUM] prime post-writing time! I have like 4 half-written posts in my drafts folder, the result of working on a post when WHAM! my site disappears taking my post with it [and tossing it into the draft folder, thankfully, and not the trash can]. Here’s the first one to make it out of draft form:
Two weekends ago I was standing in the yard, minding my own business, when I hip-checked the cat enclosure by accident. Moments later a torrent of water cascaded down my face, chest, and drill. D’oh! It turns out a flat polycarbonate plastic roof is great until it rains, and then it’s just FULL of surprises! So. I decided the roof needed to be angled. Stat!
I went to Home Depot and bought 2 10-foot 2×4’s. Here’s a photo to prove that 10-footers will fit just fine in a 2008 Honda Civic Coupe, with room to spare:
I cut one of them down to 6′ and stained it:
While the stain dried I removed the roof and dragged my power drill with extension cord out of storage [the batteries for my cordless are slowly dying]. A few minutes later I was able to position the new 6′ 2×4 on top of the existing 6′ 2×4 [that forms the top/back of the enclosure frame]. I secured them together with four, flat metal braces:
Two braces towards the outer edges on the front side and two braces towards the center on the back side:
Then I re-attached the roof. Hopefully this means no more cold, wet surprises for ME!
For the angled side pieces I cut a 39″ piece of 2×4 in half – at an angle the long way – so it formed 2 long, slender triangles. I took them outside and placed them on top of the enclosure – one on each side – to make sure they were the right fit:
Perfect!
Then stained them and screwed them to the enclosure using deck screws, then screwed the roof to them:
Now we haz angled roof. Hooray!
Awesome!
Looking good – actually it looks great!