Yesterday, Chris was off work, so he worked on framing up the dormer walls and putting up the ridge beam, all of which he got done by himself with only minimal help. By the end of the night, we had a template for the rafters ready to go, and after Finley's soccer game this morning, cut and slapped up 16 of them with ease. Then came the tricky part: the valley rafters. When it comes to a carprentry challenge, I always ask myself, "What would Tom Silva do?" He has tricks that make things easier insead of harder... like transferring instead of measuring angles. So after picturing Tom Silva up on our roof, I had an idea. After propping one boards up on the roof and tracing the lines for the cuts, we took the boards back to the shop where I stared at it for a good while trying to figure out how to cut angled angles. Our chop saw was not quite big enough for the task. I decided on the circular saw, blade set at the appropriate angle. Then I used the jigsaw to cut the perpendicular cut so the rafter would fit into its corner. We hauled the board back up to the top of the house, and miraculously, it fit! We cut the other valley rafter, and Chris screwed it into place, while I looked on, rather pleased with myself. Until... We started looking at how the rafters would come meet the valley rafter, and we realized that we had placed the rafter to line up flush with the top wall plate... not the top of the rafters. Oops. Two hours and several other obstacles later, we had the valley rafters up again and were ready to call it quits. And while I sat here typing just a minute ago, I realized we had made yet another mistake... The valley rafters will have to come down.