Shingling - punishment for not paying more attention in school

 The shingling continues.  Eyeballing the middle and right hand slopes of the centre roof area, based on the lines drawn 5/8th of an inch apart on the left roof, did not work.  Not only were the shingle lines not lining up, the spacing between rows was inconsistent and it looked awful.  So out came the paint scraper and I broke off most of the shingles on the middle and right hand roofs to try again.

The next attempt I was carefully marking each row of the middle roof based on a ruler held along the bottom of the left and right shingle rows so that they would line up.  This also did not work: the middle roof rows were getting further apart to the point where the gap was going to exceed the height of a shingle.  Out came the paint scraper again.  Many shingles lost their lives in the retreat.

It was time to bring in the big guns: my son who has a major in Chemistry and now works in accounting.  The maths gene that skipped me is strong in him. Much to his entertainment, I explained my maths problem and provided photos.  He advised me to measure the angles of the roof pitches and from there it becomes a trigonometry problem.  I used a protractor to determine that the left hand gable was a 69 degree apex, whereas the bigger right hand gable was a 72.5 degree apex.  It seems likely that they are meant to be the same angle and it is down to the error inherent in putting together a plywood kit.  The middle roof I measured off a straight line on the right hand roof by folding paper into the angle, it appears to be at a 45 degree pitch.  Using this online calculator, setting the angle at 35 degrees (splitting the difference between the two gables) and setting the hypotenuse at 1.59 cm (5/8th of an inch) gave me the vertical height for one row on the lefthand roof.  Then I could use the same calculator to determine the hypotenuse for the same vertical height for a 45 degree angle.  That comes out at .72 of an inch, or 1.84cm.  So on the middle roof, I needed to mark lines that are just under 3/4" inch apart.

Trusting (skeptically) in the math, I corrected the lines on the middle roof and started sticking on shingles yet again.  By now I am heartily sick of all shingles and wishing I had just used shingle-printed paper.  Or paint.  At first it looked like once again the alignment wasn't working out, but I didn't care by this point.  However, as I got further up, it was looking increasingly okay - maybe not exactly aligned on all three roofs but close enough that you don't really notice.  

It wasn't until I broke into the second bag of shingles that I realised two things:  1) the new bag was split evenly between dark brown shingles and light shingles, no medium tones like the previous bag; and 2) all the rows I had done so far on the roof were in light shingles, unlike all the other roofs which had a mix of tones.  Presumably I'd used up all the mid-tones in previous attempts.  So after I had finished shingling the three roofs, I had to go back with a brush and some wood stain and darken random shingles across the roofs to blend in the darker shingles from the new bag.

So it's done up to the ridge line and now I need to decide how I am going to treat the ridgelines.

Build a dollshouse they said. It will be fun they said.