Normally I like shingle courses spaced a little tighter, but having them larger is not only saving us a ton of $$, but it also sort of mirrors the unusually large exposure of our lap siding on the rest of the house. Lastly, the 11″ spacing was the only way I could work out to keep each electrical box within a single course. I didn’t want to have to put in the big pieces of wood that often surround lights and switches on newer houses. In the same spirit as removing all the conduit and sinking everything into the wall, I’m trying to make it all look less cluttered.

Looking like a real house now...

Now for some of the back story to help explain why we weren’t too excited about taking on this project and kept deferring it. First, here’s a picture (taken for my dad, so he could create our landscape plan), which shows the area in question. Yeah, exposed plywood isn’t the best idea, but it really doesn’t look bad considering that it’s been that way for 7 years!

One of these things is not like the others

OK, so we are only talking about about 200 square feet of siding, right? So what’s the big deal? Well, for starters we did not have enough siding to actually finish the wall. All we had was a pile of scraps in the garage that were the pieces pulled off when we re-framed the wall for the kitchen remodel. Every single door and window opening on both kitchen walls was moved, so much so that on the long wall only a single stud was not moved or replaced. That, of course, meant that we had a bunch of siding that had been cut for the old configuration, leaving us with a bunch of odd pieces that wouldn’t all be usable on the new wall. Our siding is also an unusual size that we have been unable to find at either lumber stores or at the Rebuilding Center or any other salvage shops.

Totally reconfigured

That left us with only two options…cover this wall with all new siding that wouldn’t match the rest of the house or remove the siding from the back wall and repurpose it on the kitchen wall. We had decided a couple of years ago that we would consolidate the siding and redo the back wall with cedar shingles, since the difference in material wouldn’t be as jarring there as it would be if it were next to the original siding. And while this had been our plan for some time, we did not appreciate being forced by the bank to do it at a moment’s notice.

Siding just waiting to be "borrowed"

And once the back wall was opened up, it would need plywood installed, as the original parts of our house have no sheathing. Taking off the siding means that the stud cavities are opened up to the world. And, of course, since we were wanting to do shingles back here, plywood would be required anyway. So, this is how the week started out, with the unpleasant task of having to open up a wall to be able to side another. And since we can never keep things simple, I also thought this would be a great opportunity to be able to remove the conduit from the wall and embed the wiring inside. Lastly, we’d need to add window trim and fabricate more of the drip cap that we also can’t purchase anywhere (without paying to have it custom-milled).

The last obstacle to this project was more psychological, and perhaps entomological, in nature. Back when were were finishing up the kitchen prior to moving in, my dad commented on a piece of old stud that was in the debris pile on the patio. He said that it looked a lot like some of the bug-damaged wood in Atlanta, where he used to live. I was really surprised by that, because I was kind of ignorant at the time. The holes were so uniform they looked like a they were a variety of pressure-treated wood. Unfortunately, everything was all closed up by that point, but it’s always been on the back of my mind. I didn’t want to fully finish the outside of the house without checking to make sure that we didn’t have any bug problems. So, that meant that I had to open up even more walls from the outside…

Checking for damage

I am glad I did, because I did find some damaged pieces. I had assumed it was from termites, but the exterminator said the holes looked more like powder post beetles, which actually can come in the wood from a mill, as opposed to termites, which would come up from the soil. It was also pretty clear that the damage was very selective. There were some studs in the back wall from when the back porch was enclosed into the kitchen in the ’60s, and only those pieces had damage. Everything that we installed in 2004 looked perfect. I had him check out the crawl space under there as well, and it was all good – phew! He sprayed all the studs from the outside, so there should be no future problems, either. You can see a couple of missing studs in the corner. Since those had enough holes to be structurally weakened, I opted to just remove and replace them. In fact, they were so weak that one of them snapped in half when I was prying it off the other. After letting the treated wood dry a bit, I replaced the plywood and started hanging tar paper.

Only here after 2 days of work? Isn't this where we started?? Well, maybe we did gain some trim in the process...

After fabricating the drip cap and building boxes to enclose the water heater in/out vents and the dryer vent, it was time to hang some siding…

Only halfway done, so time to start pulling from the back wall!

Unfortunately, even after working some very long days, I did not get enough siding up (less than in the above picture) to satisfy the appraiser who came back out to inspect the wall. Even though I argued that the tar paper did, in fact, protect the wood from the elements, our loan closing was rapidly heading south. At noon on closing day, our broker managed to find another bank that would purchase the loan without requiring the siding to be done first. They gave us a 60  day window to get it done, which was much more reasonable than the 6 days we had from the first bank. Ironically, I finished up the siding that night, so we realy only missed it by half a day.

Yeah, the blue still looks like crap.

Meanwhile, the back wall looked like this:

The area between the window and the door was temporarily covered over with tar paper for the inspection, so it also needed to be opened up, insulated and have plywood installed.

And with insulation:

Itchy, itchy warmth

And here’s how it looked after quitting tonight. Our patio door has some trim for the first time, so that’s kind of exciting.

All plywood done!

Since we’ve got 60 days, we’re going to wait until the back all is all shingled before getting re-inspected. No sense tempting fate and getting an appraiser that decides that it’s a problem to have un-sided areas on the patio! And now that we gotten this far, we are almost glad that we were forced into this. Who knows when we would have actually done in voluntarily? And once it’s all painted, our exterior is DONE!

A little mildew, but not too bad...

After about one year, we found that they had rotted out. Like so many things done by our previous owner, I’m sure it was fixed up with a nice coat of paint just before we bought the house. For a long time we got by with one railing, but it’s long since given up its ghost as well. I was supposed to be replacing all of this last week when I was taking time off of work, but a certain other thing got in the way. The goal is still to get these in place and painted before the winter rains start.

One railing and pot removed, so the one remaining is the "good" one

There is seriously no wood left in that thing!!

We bid on an artistic rendering of a home at Ginger’s preschool auction fundraiser a couple of weeks ago. I’ve always thought that these were cool, but it’s not something that we ever got around to doing (how can we spend money on a picture of our house when the actual thing still wants to suck every cent it can out of our bank account?). Well the auction gave us a great excuse to have it done, and we’re pretty excited to have the sketch. The artist, Ken, did a great job, and he was really pleasant to work with. We wanted to give him a mention on our site in case anyone is interested in having something like this done for their own home. As you can see, he does nice work.

Sketch by Ken Quinlan-Pierce

I had intended to purchase a couple of moderately sized skylights, say 2′x4′, but the roofer we used had a much better suggestion.  He came up with the idea of framing out 4×12′ boxes, which then could be covered with a single sheet of polycarbonate.  By running the panels under the eaves and all the way back to the house, no flashing would be necessary at the top, and by extension, no leaks should ever develop.  Another perk of doing it this way was that for the same $$ as what we would have paid for 16 square feet of skylights, we ended up with at least 80 square feet!  The patio is now WAY brighter, and we are also getting much more light into our kitchen and family room.  A win-win.

Pile of old aluminum panels

Since the roofers left things half-done during the rainiest day on record, I had to create an aqueduct to channel all the runoff

LIGHT!

View from above

This is what it looked like a few years ago, when I had to cut the hole for the upstairs drywall. The roof would then spend the next 3 years being covered with a (barely effective) blue tarp.

They came back out yesterday to swap out the mis-drilled panels and to install the other door, as well as our hardware. Not only do they look so much better, they actually work. No more fighting with doors that won’t open or close! Now we just need paint and the rest of the trim…

A big difference!

Here is how our garage looks today.  All the trim is up except the header boards, and one of our garage doors is in.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the garage door company fubar’d the hardware, though, which means we have to wait longer so they can get replacement panels.

Because these are faux-carriage doors, we wanted hardware that at least helped maintain the illusion.  Stephanie had discussed this with the door company, and the decision was that we would procure the hardware on our own (since they didn’t seem to be able to or want to get it).  When she came out of the house during the install, though, she found a single, standard chrome handle had been installed near the middle of the door.  It is weird how such a small thing can make such a difference, but it really does.  The handle is neither centered on the door, nor centered on the piece of door to which it’s attached.  It grabs your eye and really makes you look at it.  Additionally, the lift handle at the bottom (not visible in photo) was installed in a similar off-kilter way.  We are now waiting for new panels to be made, and these will end up going to someone that doesn’t want their “carriage doors” to look like carriage doors.  Otherwise, though, the door looks really good and will look even better once it’s painted to match the house colors.

If you compare the two pictures, you will notice the middle looks very different.  Previously, the two doors were centered in their respective openings, but the right garage is about 11″ wider than the left.  This made for a funky imbalance in the trim.  Stephanie had the great idea of shifting the right door over towards the right side, so that all trim could be the same size.  Fortunately, the CMU blocks in the middle section were recessed by almost 3/4″ relative to the concrete header, so it was a (relatively) simple matter of building this area up with plywood, which will get painted to match the garage/house color.  The new symmetry gives the whole garage a much more polished look.

Before the gap between doors was widened

The three 1×10 cedar boards that I had painstakingly cut, notched and primed to sit proudly on the sides of our new garage doors did not fall into that category.  Yes, they were sitting too close to the curb while I ran to the hardware store for some nails, but there was no “free” sign on them.  It is awfully presumptuous to think you can grab anything within reach of your car without even making the effort to knock on the door first.  Or maybe they were taken maliciously, but regardless, they were gone.

Some signs on the trees and postings on craigslist didn’t result in the miraculous return of our boards, so I had to take yesterday off work to get new ones all ready for the garage door install on Thursday.  Since the 1x10s were kind of scarce (Mr. Plywood had only a few of them, and most were pretty knotty), I switched to 1x8s and used a scarf joint to increase the width by 2″.  This should get covered by whatever trim strip comes with the garage door anyway.

The biggest part of the day was breaking up the concrete under the door.  A tree root growing under the driveway had gradually pushed up the center of the door by at least two or three inches.  Since it was a small area, I thought I could just get it done with a breaker bit on my rotohammer (something I have never attempted in the past, mind you).  20 minutes of zero progress was enough to convince me to drop the $35 on a jackhammer rental.  It still took over an hour to bust it all up, but it would’ve taken three days with the rotohammer!  Eventually, I will break up the rest of the “driveway” (maybe 5′ in length) up to the sidewalk and then replace it, likely with pavers.

Sitting flat for the first time in years