No, that’s not a bad homonym (somewhere, my fifth-grade English teacher sheds a tear of pride) after this weekend I really do want a brake. Not a break, although one of those wouldn’t hurt either.
Up until Thursday of last week, I didn’t even know what a brake was… being more inclined to work in wood, glass, or ceramic when I get the chance. Metal is always far, far, down my list.
And like everything else we’ve attempted with the house, at second glance the task of installing all of the trim and siding was seriously more complicated that I first anticipated. I know, right? Shocking.
Turns out I have my body weight’s worth of flashing to install around the foundation, over the windows, behind the corner trim, and almost every other place you can think of on the house. It’s unreal. And daunting. Luckily we have a friend savior who worked with our framing crew (and I’m certain is to thank for the windows that were installed correctly) and who often will come over and tell us how to do what we’re supposed to be doing.
I’m not going to lie, when he told us we’d have to bend all 250 lf of the metal for the flashing I had flashbacks to the bloody mess that was installing the wire mesh on our fence…
… and I gave an involuntary shudder. But Doug-the-savior was all, don’t worry, I’m going to bring my brake over and you are going to love it.
And I was like blah, blah, blah, someone get me a box of band-aids and… ohmigodlookwhatIdid!
Without. Bleeding.
So, for the uninitiated, a brake is a tool used to bend sheet metal very easily. It works just how you supposed it wood would*, holding a ten-foot strip of metal in place while another lever bends it to whatever degree you wish. It’s totally manually operated, which means very little chance of losing a finger. If you’re going to attempt to install your own siding… read up on flashing, and then rent a brake for the weekend and bend all your metal.
In all honesty, I didn’t get to use the break that much this weekend (even though I wanted to), and I’m not going to buy one because I still prefer working with wood. Which is why I bought myself one of these instead…
Listen, it’s not called an addiction for no reason, people.
I’ll give you one guess what I’m planning to do with this thing. (Shhh… I haven’t broken the news to my better and more mysterious half yet.) Hi honey! Love you! Just keep reading, there’s nothing for you to see here. Hey look! A 1969 Mustang!
Diversionary tactics. They’re what make our relationship work. I’ll talk to you guys a little more about my planer… later.
Back to our weekend, which sucked because not one board of siding got nailed in place, but was awesome because we figured out how to get it started.
Our thing-I-keep-calling-a-sill-but-is-actually-called-something-else is a 2×4, cut with a 15-degree bevel on the back (and the front-not shown here), a piece of flashing that runs behind and underneath the not-a-sill, a furring strip on the first piece, and the first piece cut at a reverse 20-degree angle to sit nicely on the ledge.
The weekend we got the bevels cut in all the not-a-sill pieces, we got the flashing bent, MysteryMan got the necessary blocking put in on our box-end soffits. This is the best quote I read about soffits on the internet this weekend:
Soffits are the Rodney Dangerfield of home construction—they’re mostly unseen and often the last detail to get attention. They’re just plain unglamorous. They are, however, extremely important to the longevity and comfort of your home.
I’m not even sure if that metaphor makes sense, but I’m willing to go with it. Let’s just say MysteryMan is more likely to compare them to the Devil Himself than Mr. Dangerfield.
On the good news side of things, we did get all of the wood for the soffits primed, and mostly painted, thanks to my Mom who spent her weekend baking in the sun in our yard with a roller and a lot of pieces of plywood.
When she caught me with my camera she was all, “Ho-ney, you’re not going to put me on the Internet are you? I look like a dork.” Shortly thereafter she walked all the way from the garage into the house pouring paint down the front of herself the whole time without realizing it. You’re definitely not a dork, Mom.
With the exception of MysteryMan–who has to take me with my camera and website, or not at all– I do try to respect that some people don’t wan’t to look like a dork on the internet. Unfortunately I really thought all of our soffit board laid out in the yard was something to see, and I didn’t have a picture without our resident painter in it. So I just censored her out.
What? She’s incognito.
Seriously… even though we didn’t get a lot of siding up, we did get a lot of help this weekend from friends and family. Thanks to everyone who lent a hand or some tools to us to help us get this done before winter.
*Als0 thanks to Gene for pointing out the actual bad homonym I did (inadvertently) use in this post. My grammar and proofreading skills decrease exponentially with the number of minutes after midnight I write these posts.
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Gene
Figuring out how to start something like the siding is frequently more than half the battle. The current Habitat homes we’re working on having this funky metal corner trim that took the staff and Americorps members some doing to figure out for the first time.
And while you successfully avoided homonym abuse in the title, when talking about the brake, there’s “It works just how you supposed it wood…”. D’oh!
kitliz
Oh my god Gene I’m *dying*… that’s hilarious. I really need to stop writing these things after midnight. lol.