A Long-Delayed Update On Progress Re-siding the House

(click on photos for a larger image) 

In the most recent ( July 14, 2025 ) update of the re-siding project, I showed the progress to that time on the west side of the main house, which is the side we started on. Later that summer/fall we moved on to the south side, and this summer we have mostly finished the project; I still have a few small and/or odd shaped and/or difficult-to-reach pieces of siding to install and quite a bit of trim and a lot of painting.  But, we've made real progress, and it's looking really good.

This photo is from late October 2025, showing the southwest corner of the house, with the south/back wall, other than the patio wall,  mostly complete. It required five levels of scaffolding (each level is 5 feet tall) to reach the highest points; Karen caught me in the final stage od dis-assembling the scaffolding.

To the left/west side of the above photo is a quick-and-dirty retaining wall I built to make it easier to put up the scaffolding when I get back to working on the west wall of the house; the difficulty is due to the at least five feet difference in ground-level from the corner of the house to next place where a scaffolding frame would go..  The follow photo shows the start of building that retaining wall, just to give you an idea of how quick-and-dirty building it was.  I drove T-posts into the ground and slipped construction-grade clay tile (which were once used as the basement-interior foundations of the house) over the posts, then filled the chambers with expanding foam.  This summer, I built a dry-stone wall, which leans into the clay-tile wall, and which I hope will allow this retaining to do its job for decades.

 

 

 

This is the north wall of the "great room" addition in the foreground, which connects to the attached garage/apartment addition.

This photo is from July 2025, of the north side of the original house showing the wood siding I had installed in about 1990; it's the last side we'll get to. 

And this is how that wall looks now, still unpainted and with the trim not yet complete. I decided that I could rescue and reuse the wooden upper parts of the window trim, rather that trying to build new of PVC, as the roof overhang protects them from the worst of the weather.