Mission Tile, Tapered vs Straight

Just for fun I sometimes carry on an internal dialog in which I explain, to myself, how something does or should work. I then challenge myself, call myself a naïve, simplistic fool and then demand a better explanation, which I calmly provide to myself in a condescending tone, on and on, back and forth until I can understand a thing or at least pretend that I do.

This weekend I set about explaining to myself about mission roof tiles. I love the way they look and how they fit together and how they last forever. We have straight barrel mission tiles on our house. I've studied them in preparation for the pagoda project, made notes and was prepared to go. When I finally found a place to buy some tiles--it is not an easy thing to do because most places will only sell to an actual roofer--I discovered that the tiles would be tapered mission tiles instead of straight.

"Is that OK?," the guy asked. Because he was selling me the tiles at the contractor's price, I just said "OK."

The tiles came this weekend. Sure enough, they are tapered. But why? I built a little mock-up to lay out the tiles and see if I could understand this. I found a website that described how to lay them out--it's a completely different pattern than the straight tile. Luckily, they are (I hope) exactly what I needed for the curved corners because they have more wiggle room.


I've attempted to hash this out in my mind. I go out and look at the tile and it sort of makes sense. Then I forget. My problem is that I've always had a problem with spatial awareness. For example, I'm upstairs now but I can't point to the location of any of the rooms downstairs. They are just down there somewhere.


If it were not for "left" and "right" I would be continually lost.


The roofing paper is up. Next comes the wooden framework for the tile.