What I Did on My Summer Vacation

(click on photos for a larger image)

As I mentioned in the last post, thanks to prodding by my sister, Karen -- and her active help in doing the work -- I have finally started the much-needed project of re-siding my house.  In the last post, I focused on the easiest part of the project: re-siding what remains as exterior of the east wall and gable of the original structure. This post is about the west wall of the house: half being original and half being the 1930s addition to the house.

First, a couple of photos to illustrate just why residing the house (and especially the west wall) is so necessary.

As I'd said in the last post, part of the problem is that the wood siding I had installed in about 1990 wasn't the best quality wood -- what is, these days? And part of the problem is due to a mistake I made in installing it.   We see the result here: rotted wood -- my attempt the forestall this very problem actually contributed to causing it.

This photo was taken after we had ripped off about half the siding of this "bay".  This "bay" is part of the original structure, which was three rooms at ground and two rooms above.The (barely visible) "bay" to the right is part of the 1930s addition to the house.. 

The sunburst in the gable is from a demolished house, as are the pillars on the porch (not visible in this photo). The octagonal window and cedar shingles below the sunburst are my doing from about 1990.

This photo shows the start of re-siding this "bay". The white board above the foundation is a 1x12 PVC board -- expensive, but impervious to water. I'll run a band like this all around the foundation.  To be honest, it's strictly for appearance, as a visual "base" of the walls. 

The vertical 1x12s, on the other hand, which divide the walls into "bays", are not just visual, but also serve the purpose of allowing me to cover/protect nearly all the joints in the siding from weather/water.  The siding boards are 12' long, and fit between the vertical 1x12s; then I install a vertical 1x3 at the two sides of the vertical 1x12 to cover the ends of the siding.  Only on the front room (which is 20' wide) and the south wall of the dining room and master bedroom (which are 16' wide) will I have exposed joints in the siding in the expanses below the windows.

 

This photo, taken from the south-west corner of the house, shows the west wall with the new siding and trim up, as yet unpainted. I decided to forego painting it just yet as I wanted to move the scaffolding to allow us to install siding on the south wall of the sun-room (recall, that wall is in effect on the third floor). Even with the two of us, it took several hours to raise the five levels of scaffolding necessary to work on the sun-room south wall.

 And from the north-west.

As the west wall of the house gets the worst of the weather, I decided to build "false roofs" over the kitchen and dining room windows to divert some of the rainwater away from them.

The to-do list for this side of the house is:

1) install soffits under the "false roofs";

2) build/install the window treatments for the kitchen and dining room windows;

3) decide how I'm going to finish that bedroom dormer;

4) paint it all

This photo, taken from the south-west corner, shows the south wall of the house ... or rather, of the "main" part of the house -- there is a whole house-sized extension to the north-east. To the left, at ground-level, the basement door. Above that, dining room windows. To the right, living room windows. To the right, a covered patio (I originally intended it to be open to the sky, but I eventually roofed it, fearing that freezing water in the substrate would over time destroy the retaining-wall). Above the dining room is the master bedroom -- Yes! I still use that term. And to the right of that is the sun-room.

When I bought the house, where the sun-room is now was just a flat roof above the 1930s extension of the living room. I turned what had been a small bedroom and a small bathroom and hallway into the master bedroom (12x16), and replaced a small door which had opened from the hall to that flat roof with a large sliding-glass patio-door.  I thought, "Great! I have a private patio off my bedroom!" However, water always finds a way, and a few years later, water dripping from the roof above was leaking in at the patio-door. And that is why I built the sun-room ... which also has a flat roof, but it's tied into other roofs, rather than abutting walls, as the 1930s flat roof had,

I didn't have scaffolding when I installed the old wood siding in about 1990. What I had was two ladders -- of different lengths, and thus often different angles when extended -- and ladder-jacks, with a 2x12 bridging the gap. Can you imaging how much fun it was to install the siding above the master bedroom window?

 

Maintenance-free ... Or, at any rate, Better Weather Protection

UPDATED, showing almost completed result (click on photos for a larger image)..

I'm finally re-siding my house, which I have needed to do for several years -- the wood siding I installed about 1990 wasn't good quality, and, frankly, I made mistakes in installing it. So, sections of the siding, especially the west wall, were badly deteriorated.  

The biggest drawback to starting this project sooner was that I wanted the result to look much like the house's original look, but the nearest I could get was in vinyl ,,, and I detest vinyl (*) . The house's original siding is a style/design called "Dutch lap".  After I removed the (badly deteriorated) Masonite, which had probably been installed in the 1960s, I re-sided with pine "Dutch lap". Other than the knots showing through the paint, I was pleased with the result ... for a while. But, as I said, it wasn't high-quality siding, and I had incorporated a design flaw which allowed water damage.

The siding product I have finally settled on, after much resistance, is a cement/composite clapboard siding. I was able to get a smooth version of it; that is, without the fake "cedar grain" surface such as they sell at Lowe's.  Naturally, the smooth product that what I want costs more than that with the "cedar grain". Other than the original wood soffit/fascia at the roofline, I'll replace all the trimwork with boards made of PVC. Once painted, it will look look wood.

This first photo is of what is left of the east side of the original house.  By that I mean that my "great room" addition extends to the east of the original house, leaving only this bit of the second floor gable still expose to the sky.  This gable is my favorite of all of them -- I love how the cedar shingles and window-frame I installed in 1990 turned out. But, unless one is standing on roof of the "great room", the gable really isn't visible.

One of my sisters (Karen) volunteered to help me reside the house; that's what motivated me to finally decide on a product and start the project.  She took this photo of my progress as of her arrival in Mansfield last Friday noon.  

Because of the "great room" addition, there wasn't much tear-off to do on this wall: just a bit of siding below the frieze, the frieze itself, and the window frame (except for the top treatment, as the cedar shingles were cut and installed around that).  The sort of taupe-colored siding to the left of the window is the new (unpainted) cement-board siding. The body of the house will be painted to the color of these cedar shingles; the cedar shingles in the gables will be a lighter grey (I painted these with the body's color to see what an expanse of this color would look like; the trim will be a yellow close to what it now is.

 

 

 

The first photo was taken on Friday (June 27). This second photo was taken on Sunday. I think. There is a bit more detailing to do, and of course, the painting.  The trim which is yellow in this photo is either original to the house, or, in the case of the window frame header, what I had made in 1990. The trim which is still white is the new trim made of PVC.  The still-raw wall to the left of the photo (above the original gable) is part of the "sun room" addition.

It has been terribly hot and humid (and raining!) since my sister arrived, so we're moving slowly.  With this being to the east, we could work on this area only a couple of hours in the morning and then in the afternoon once some shade had developed.

 

 

 

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(*) Why do I detest vinyl siding? It's not the fact that it's vinyl which I detest, but rather the way it's manufactured, and intended to be installed, and that it tends to provide a foothold for the growth of algae (and I have enough problem with that).

 

1) Properly maintained wood siding does not show wood-grain; but vinyl siding is made with an ugly and pointless faux "wood-grain" ... which just happens to provide a convenient home for algae to anchor itself in.  Why do you think you see so many 'nice" houses with a hideous green film down their sides?

2) Vinyl siding is hollow, and it shows from a mile away.  Now, IF they would cover a solid wood or composite substrate with a vinyl coating -- smooth, of course, no faux "wood-grain" -- I'd have no complaints about vinyl siding.

3) Because vinyl siding is hollow, separate pieces don't butt together, but rather one overlaps the other. And it shows (from a mile away).  This "feature" also provides a convenient access for high winds to rip the siding off an entire wall.

 

4) Because of the way vinyl siding is designed and intended to be installed, there is a high probability that water will get between the siding an the structure.  

 

Water is the great enemy of buildings; well, water and the myth of "maintenance-free"  When I first bought the house, I had to rebuild an entire wall because water had gotten behind the Masonite siding which had been installed at some point with the (false) promise that it would make the house "maintenance-free".

UPDATE (2025/07/14):

This is almost finished result of the re-working of the east bedroom gable, after I decided on the color to paint the gable's cedar shingles (the color in this photo isn't the best: the blue of the cedar shingles is indeed a "deep" color, but it's also "vibrant" -- Ah! The color does show better in the "expanded" view). I still need to scrape and repaint the original-to-the-house soffit and fascia; that won't get done any time soon.

Finally, here is a wider view, also showing the east wall of the sun-room addition. I still have to build the window framing/treatment for both walls of the sun-room.

We managed to install siding on both exterior walls of the sun-room.  I use the word "manage" because the (unseen) south wall is in effect on the third floor, as the basement floor is grade-level on the south side of the house.  We had to put up five levels of scaffolding to be able to work on the south wall.

Lest you think that this is all we accomplished during the two weeks my sister was here, I'll make another post showing how/where most of our time was spent.