siding

I’m writing this post from the future and back-dating it, because I realized that we had never shown a picture of the back after tearing it open and re-siding it. Here’s how it looks with the new cedar shingles. We did not have enough of the original lap siding to go around, so we opted to make the back unique and go with cedar shingles. It doesn’t look as jarring as if we had done it on the side of the kitchen, where it would have contrasted with the dining room wall. We always like shingle-clad bungalows, so it looks pretty good back here. If you want to jump ahead, we did eventually start painting it.

Wow!

I had a little time over the weekend to start working on the shingles for the back wall. It’s the type of project that I visualize as being very quick and easy, but of course, it’s not. On every row I was reminded of every non-plumb surface on our house and had to deal with the almost-but-not-quite-right angles of cedar shingles. It should look great once it’s all painted, although it’s taking me a bit of time to get used having siding back there, having shingles instead of lap and having the corner trim, which is a new detail we had to add to be able to cleanly mate up the disparate siding materials.

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...

I hadn’t yet managed to take my obligatory week “off” to work on the house, so I scheduled it for last week. On the Wednesday prior, I got a call from our mortgage broker saying that the underwriter at the bank was freaking out about our exposed plywood siding on the kitchen. They wouldn’t close the loan (scheduled for 6 days later) with it in that condition. I told him “no way,” that we were going to have to walk away from the deal, since finishing that was going to be a big, complicated mess that we weren’t prepared to do at this time. While it was ugly, the deep overhangs of our house did a really good job of protecting it from the weather, so I thought it was a ridiculous requirement. Anyway, after Stephanie and I talked it over that night, we decided that it made sense to go ahead and try to finish the siding, since we would be losing nearly $500 in our wasted appraisal, not to mention the $350 in extra interest that were were paying each month.

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

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