The roof of the structure is something we gave a great deal of thought to. As we looked at more and more houses it seemed that the single most distinguishing feature of the house is the roof, and specifically the pitch of the roof.  In the central US, the vast majority of the roofs are utilitarian and don’t add much in the way of eye candy. When we paged through our notebook of design ideas we noticed quickly that nearly all of the profiles included had relatively low sloped rooflines, or as I have been calling them ‘California’ roofs.
It turns out that the common conception is that anything less than 6 / 12 pitch (6 feet of rise over 12 feet of run) is a no-no due to ice damming, at least according to our draftsman Jim. We struggled a lot with this, especially after we saw the preliminary drawings that came complete with a ’standard’ roof line.
My brother in law Matt is a structural engineer, and after all the thinking I had done about the fact that the exterior walls would be made entirely of concrete, I asked the next obvious question of ‘why not the roof?’Â This would seem to accomplish two goals of having a (relatively) flat roof, in addition to eliminating what I perceived to be the weak link in the construction envelope.
Matt and Doug talked me out of this soon enough, for the primary reason that the structural support required to have a concrete attic floor would be tremendously expensive, and that the fireproofing / insulation benefits of concrete could be achieved fairly easily with some fire code drywall and a nice helping of cellulose insulation.
So we circled back to our plans and determined that we would have a more traditional roof profile, but would use a standing seam metal roof in combination with a somewhat lower pitch (4/12 or 5/12) to keep it a little bit unique and fit in with our low maintenance goal.
We are still working on the exact details and hope to have that ironed out in the next few weeks.