Among the many, many things that the builder of our house did wrong was our copper roofing. And one of the things he did was use caulk on the ends of the standing seams. We had to recaulk often in the first 3 years we lived here - remember that copper is a metal and when the sun hits it, it expands a lot - it was always busting the caulked seams. Then the rest of the house went to heck and we ended up having the entire exterior redone. That said, our roofing was quite a bit different - we originally had the standing seams coming all the way up to the wall of the house and caulked at the top where it met the vertial flashing (like yours does) - the roofer who redid everything was old-school Italian and did everything with hand tools the old fashioned way. He said the proper way to do it is to fold the seams down at the top and run them under flashing that is parallel with the roofline. Because of the small surface area of your roof and the number of angles you have meeting together, I'm not sure if that would work for you or how it would look. I will say that there's an awful lot of incompetant people in the copper roofing industry - our original guys screwed it up royally and then the first roofer we hired to fix it (who supposedly specialized in ONLY copper roofing) screwed it up again (he was using pop rivets and caulk!) I'm attaching a link to my whole ordeal - if you flip through the album, you'll see tons of pictures of the both our old bad copper work and the new ones we have - maybe it can give you some idea of how it should be done. Here is a link that might be useful: Our house saga

Man, you've got a whole SLEW of things you need to take into consideration. First, you've picked a good tile. You definitely want a porcelain, so it'll stand up to the elements. However, you don't want to use the Ditra-Set to install the Ditra, unless you also get Hydroment's Flexalastic latex additive. Mix the Ditra-Set with straight additive, and no water for setting the Ditra, and then mix the Ditra-Set with water when you go to set the tile. One thing you need to be very sure of, and that is that the subfloor pitches sufficiently AWAY from the house. The pitch spec is the same as for shower floors-- 1/4" per running foot from the house to the edge of the deck. If you're going to have short walls going around the deck, you want to lap Kerdi-Band up the walls, and behind the finish as a kind of flashing to keep water from settling into the walls where it can freeze overnight during warm days and cold nights of spring. Also, if you have walls up around the porch, you want to have scuppers every so often where any water can drain off, instead of sitting on the tile and refreezing. Even with the Ditra, if water gets under the tile and freezes, it'll pop tiles. As for grout, Spectralock. That'll also help with keeping water out from under the tile, as well as standing up to the elements much better than a standard grout.

Put the roof on first,stringers lay in the direction of the flow so the decking is runing across the stringers. There is no membrane other than the torch down modified. T&G decking drains the same way any other decking will thru the cracks. T&G decking will do nothing far as keeping the underside dry and in fact you dont want it to. Dryspace and the many other systems like it are trouble at the get go and down the road,are really spendy, never work as well as a torch down that costs less. If your still stuck on doing it from the underside glav sheet metal roofing can be installed for a whole lot less $ and do the same thing. The Al has a good way to put the stuff on. But really its a matter of doing it right the first time or do it wrong and hate it forever. John

Would love to hear from anyone who used a white from the Hardie “dream collection”…I’m renovating a colonial and want a true white. The arctic white is very popular where I live and it definitely appears gray, especially next to white Azek trim and it’s not the e look I’m going for.