Making A Corrugated Metal Roof: Part 1

Don't let my killer tan distract you.

Well, my mom's winning.  My plan for this project was always an industrial building in the not-so-great part of a major city.  A few weeks ago, my mom looked at the house and said, "Wow it looks like an old factory building in Western Pennsylvania," to which I responded, "Oh Mom, you're silly."  Since then, every time she visits she asks these things:

1.  Can I have this when you're done?  (No.)

2.  Can you put a quilting room in it?  (No.)

3.  Can you make it more "Western Pennsylvania?"  (No.  Wait, maybe).

Although I hold steadfast on the first 2, it is slowly morphing into an abandoned coal factory building somewhere in a country industrial town.  Case in point: the roof.  What was once going to be a simple "tar" roof (major city style) is now going to be an aged, metal corrugated roof (country style).  Here's how I'm making the roof:

 First I found a Dell box that used corrugated cardboard.  You can probably buy corrugated cardboard without the extra layers; however, I'm very cheap and this was free.

I then peeled off the top layer to expose the corrugation.  This took a while (exactly 3 episodes of Outnumbered) and I had to go groove-by-groove to peel of the paper.  Eventually it looked like this:

And my floor looked like this:

After vacuuming, I took an extra fine grit sandpaper piece and folded it to make an edge.  Then I roughly sanded the cardboard and each groove to get rid of as many extra little papers.

 My sanding resulted in this:

 

BIG difference, hooray!  At this point, I wasn't worrying about the left over paper pieces because I knew I was going to coat the whole thing in spackle.  

  

The next step was to cut squares out of the cardboard sheet.  I made sure not to make them all the exact same size since it's supposed to look like a roof made of metal sheets.  I glued the pieces to the roof and taped them down so they wouldn't lift too much.

 

It's spackle time!  I use regular spackling paste that I bought in Home Depot.  The paste is too thick to apply as-is without ruining the grooves of the cardboard, so I mixed it with some water until it was thin enough to coat the paper.  Now let dry overnight.

Go to Part 2: Sanding, Painting, and Staining