The A-frame is clad in Wapa — a hardwood from French Guiana, dense and oily, the kind of wood that doesn’t need to be treated because it already knows how to handle rain.
Most A-frame plans online assume you’ll use cedar: light, easy to split, smells good on site. Cedar performs in the Caribbean. Wapa lasts.
The shingles arrived rough-cut and had to be sorted by hand — Anaïs spent a full afternoon sizing and grading them before we started laying. Each row overlaps the one below by a third. You work from the bottom up, and you don’t rush it, because a mistake three rows down means pulling everything back off.
We laid most of the cladding ourselves, section by section, over several weeks of weekends. Léon mostly supervised from the ground. She slept in the shade of the palms.
The A-frame is two years old now. The Wapa has turned a natural silver-grey, smooth and tight. It doesn’t leak. It doesn’t swell. In ten years it’ll look exactly the same, just a bit more worn-in.
That was the point.
