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!!

This is a long overdue picture that shows all the plants that Stephanie got into the yard. It looks SO much better than before. Now that we have no more grass, all the sprinklers were disconnected, and we are 100% on drip irrigation. It’s a bit of a pain to set up, but it’s so nice to be able to target the water exactly where it’s needed. Oh, and the fact that we don’t have to nurture the gazillion new plants with manual watering is pretty great, too.

Why is there a picture of Butchart Gardens on our blog?

A few nights ago, I noticed a small puddle under the sink. A check with a flashlight revealed that the water was leaking out the exit hole for the power cord. Hmmm…not good! I went to Home Depot the next day and bought another Badger 5. That night I asked the obvious question about whether it was wise to buy the same model as the one that just started leaking. A few reviews on Amazon led me to believe that eventual leaking was not unheard of for the Badgers.

Yesterday I stopped in at A-Boy and picked up this “Waste King” instead. It’s supposed to be more durable, but I guess we’ll know whether that’s true or not in time. If you look closely at the picture, you can see where I had to cut the temp/pressure relief pipe for the mini-tank heater, since it was too close (my fault) to the waste line from the disposal. I couldn’t put it back together with that pipe there, so I had to cut it and made a mental note that I need to fix it soon. We’ll see how long it takes me to get around to it…

And so far, we like the Waste King better than the Badger. It seems a little slower, but it is much smoother and far quieter than the Badger ever was. It’s a little classier, which is to be expected for an appliance with “Legend Series” in its name.

The Waste King!

We had grand plans of one day building a pathway, an outdoor oven or some other amazing, artistic creation as soon as we got to the point of having everything else done on the house. Even ignoring the obvious fact that we will never reach the point of having everything else done, we also gradually learned an important lesson about bricks: glazing is important. These bricks were very rough and porous and completely lacking in any kind of weather-resistance. Presumably, this is because most of them were indoors and not exposed to the elements. We started noticing that our bricks were gradually disintegrating out in the yard. They were splitting and cracking after being exposed to water and freeze/thaw cycles. It became apparent to us that the bricks were useless and now just taking up a bunch of space in our yard.

Fast forward to this summer… after our landscape contractors finished up the tough work on our side yard, we were left with a huge pile of crushed rock. I estimated that we had 6 yards remaining (out of a total of 12), so math is clearly not our landscaper’s strong suit. Wanting to take advantage of it while we had it, we decided to go ahead and clear out the weeds and debris from the other side of our house and gravel both sides of the narrow walkway. Our house is only about 5′ from the property line, as is our neighbors’ house, so this area has been long neglected. I ordered a dirt/sod dumpster and spent much of this last weekend loading up our yard cart with dirt, wheeling it to the front of the house, carrying it down the stairs and rolling it up into the dumpster. Fun stuff! One of the cool things about the dirt/sod dumpster, though, is that concrete chunks and bricks are also acceptable materials.

Knowing that we would never want to pay for another dumpster, I made myself go out Monday night after work and spent 3 1/2 hours hauling all 820 or so bricks down to the dumpster. It took 33 trips:

• Load 3 buckets with 8-9 bricks each
• Load buckets into the yard cart
• Push yard cart 90′ around the house to get to the front steps
• Carry buckets down the steps (did we mention that elevated lots make all house projects even worse than they already are?)
• Dump buckets of bricks into dumpster
• Return to back yard and repeat until finished

It sucked, but it’s done. And with the bricks gone and the side strip cleared out, we have for the first time achieved the elusive goal of having no crap or other garbage lying around our house. I found bits and pieces of most of our projects on the side of the house…a bunch of old molding from the family room, a rusted latch from an old door, empty cans of paint, rags and stir sticks from the house painting, remnants of the old galvanized plumbing….all of it is gone. It’s actually a pretty amazing feeling to walk around the house and not see all the clutter!

Brick-a-brac

An archaeological dig in our own backyard!

Now we can clearly see the outline of the path, and we’re pretty excited about how it looks so far. Only 10 yards of gravel to go, and it’ll be done. We are so glad not to be moving it all the way up into our yard ourselves!

Looking up...

and looking down