Soffits

What's a soffit anyways? A soffit is a decorative piece of wood, aluminum, or PVC that covers the underside of a roof overhang. It keeps critters and water from infiltrating the underside of your roof. It needs to include vents because you want air to be able to circulate between your roof covering and your insulation to prevent condensation and to prevent nasty ice dams from forming along the edge of your roof when temperatures start dipping below freezing. Unless the underside of your roof covering is vented, heat from the house will melt snow on the upper reaches of your roof. This will then freeze when it trickles down to the overhang, causing the water to pool and the roof to leak.

So here are the vented soffits on the edge of the kitchen. We used leftover boards from the ceiling. We had plenty leftover because the supplier of the planks sent about 20% more than ordered; dried hemlock usually splinters quite a bit. We've been handling it carefully, so we had maybe only 5% waste. The carpenters brought in strips of white coated aluminum for the vents. They will look much better when the fascias (roof edges) are also covered in white Maibec.