Progress is slow, but moving onward

The little solosider gauges seem to work ok, and so far Shawn hasn't complained about them. It has allowed him to work the few hours after dinner and before nightfall (when it is not raining) without my help. Evan is being a bit difficult and will not go to bed as early as he used to, so by the time I am free to help, Shawn is putting tools away. So it is nice that the siding gauges allow him to work alone. Now my estimate is that it will be November, and not December when the siding is all done. :)

The problem that we've (I mean Shawn, mostly when I say we) encountered is keeping the siding to maintain a level course. We are suspecting that the foam is somehow shifting under the weight of the siding, because Shawn will get a board up perfectly level, but the next day it is not level anymore. (though the shift is so miniscule we might be splitting hairs) Perhaps a professional sider will laugh at us at how preocuppied we are with keeping things level, since they seem to just slap the boards up and never really check for level on every course.

Here's a nice picture of the progress Shawn has made on the siding. The little square box you see just below and in between the small windows is a mount block where a hose bib will be installed.

There's been a little bit of a learning curve on notching the pieces of siding to fit around windows and getting the angle cuts where the bottom trim board goes up at an angle. It also takes a lot of time to make sure that any cuts on the boards are painted and sealed good since we will not be caulking the butt joints. This is to protect from moisture so that the siding pieces do not wick water, expand, and bubble the paint or fail.
And here's a picture of our weed garden. They have taken over the rough grading around the house, and it's too uneven and full of nails to drive the lawn mower on it. We might have to use the sickle mower in it. On the plus side, with all those roots, our soil is not eroding quite as bad when it rains.

So we are looking quite the boontuckians at the moment, but there's only so much time and so much energy, and the weeds will have to wait.

My in-laws were on vacation up in Alaska, but they can not compare all those beautiful sites and relaxing journeys to the fun of siding our house. So they are once again coming down on Saturday to give us a hand. I swear that if it wasn't for their help, we would still be stacking foam blocks to get a basement built! So we really appreciate all of the time that they take away from their lives to help us out.

Anyway, weather outlook is good for the weekend, so hopefully lots of progress will be made. Perhaps the next picture on the blog will be of the back of the basement completely sided under the band board. That would be sweet!

Happy Father's day! And until next week.

Sadly, no real post this week.

I could re-post the pictures from last week, since there's been no progress. The two days we had time to work on the house, it rained. So there's that. Hopefully, maybe this weekend it will be a different story.

We did buy a pair of solosiders and are waiting for them to arrive. What are solosiders you ask?
Check out http://www.solosider.com/instructions.html and look at the installation video.
Supposedly, these gadgets will make it possible for *ahem, cough, Shawn, cough, ahem* one person to install the siding solo. We'll see if they work as good as they claim.
So hopefully next week, there will be an update.

Ta da!

Here it is: The first piece of siding.
It has been difficult to get this right, but we are confident that by December, we will have this house sided.

Shawn painted all of the trim boards at the end of last week, to get ready for work on Saturday. He also started placing the first coat of paint on the fiber cement siding pieces. He rigged up our small utility trailer so that it could hold the 12 ft. boards with enough support to keep them straight. You can see the trailer with some siding in the picture above.

This way we can paint the siding over where it is stored by the barn, then load it onto the trailer in layers (with foam in between to protect the paint) then haul the trailer to the back of the house to use the siding.

On Saturday, Pam and Derald arrived for a good day of work. Pam was assigned to painting the siding pieces. The process involved taking a piece of siding from the bundle, placing it on the saw horses to paint so that the edges can be coated, then moving the piece onto the trailer to dry. When the trailer was full, the painted pieces were on pallets to allow them to dry. By the time the pallets were full, the siding on the trailer was dry, so a layer of foam scraps were placed on top, and another layer of newly painted pieces went on that, and so on.
You can see Pam in the picture as she rolled some paint on a siding piece. The weather was perfect for drying paint quickly. We tried to device a better, faster way to paint siding, but there's no getting around painting the edges if we want to do a quality job. So we couldn't really come up with a quick way to do what was needed.

While Pam was busy painting, the guys worked on installing the trim along the bottom of the wall. Here you can see Derald stepping back to admire the bottom trim progress. After the bottom was installed, Shawn and Derald trimmed out all of the windows and the door on the basement.

Once the windows were trimmed, they installed the 12" Band board trim that is between the basement and first floor. This is a good picture that shows all of these in one shot.

There was a lot of work accomplished on Saturday, and the bottom of the basement was then ready to begin the process of siding.
On Sunday we went to Menards to exchange the z flashing to get the correct size, and they told us the only color it comes in is brown. I find this hard to believe, and even though the racks at Menards say white z flashing, only brown was in those. So, we shrugged. It will get painted anyway.
Sunday and Monday, Shawn installed the z-flashing that is required to direct water from getting behind trim on all horizontal joints between trim and siding. He also ripped a piece of siding to make a starter strip. This is so when the first piece of siding is installed, it has the correct angle.

Here is a close-up. You can see the white trim, then the brown z-flashing, then the gray piece of starter strip installed on top of the z-flashing. You can also see in the picture how the trim covered the fasteners on the white PVC flashing below.

We think it looks nice.

On Tuesday, Shawn had to re-do the starter strip since the gap between the strip and the z-flashing was not enough and had to increase it. He also painted the starter strip since water might wick up it, and since he loves painting so much.

And finally, yesterday, he installed the first row of siding on the back. You can see a small gray square above the siding where the butt joints are between pieces. These are small pieces of pvc flashing that is used to help any wind driven rain or water that might get behind the siding at the butt joints to divert it down and out.

So on every butt joint, you place this piece of flashing overlapping the course below. Here is a close up.

Now after seeing the brown peeking under the siding, we sort of think it doesn't look too bad. It's like a little accent piece, and we may decide to not paint it after all. We'll see once we're ready to paint if we still feel the same.

Tonight, it is a trip to Lowe's to get some mount blocks for lights, outdoor outlets, and hose bibs. I also think we need new respirator cartridges to make sure they keep out silica dust. The dust from cutting fiber cement boards contains silica instead of asbestos now, though silica dust is just as nasty for your lungs as asbestos is.

We'll see what sort of progress we have for next week. Until then, God bless.