Laying the shingles was a lengthy but quite satisfying experience. Shaping the shingles at the hips was a bit fiddly, but my Japanese bakuma saw made light work of the actual cutting with very clean cuts.
However, the hip and gable design did mean that the proportion of shingles that had to be cut was quite high. It also meant quite a bit of wastage, since the offcuts could not be used elsewhere. As a result, although I had carefully calculated the roof area at 10.9 square metres (using Google Sketchup) and 1 bundle of shingles should cover roughly 2.32 square metres, my initial 5 bundles proved insufficient and I had to buy a further one.
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Although I was planning to fit ridge cap units (see Materials) over all four hips and the ridge itself, I decided additionally to apply some external frame sealant (brown) along the hips and also under the top courses below the gables.
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