I’ve been saying for the last four weeks, if we could just have one more weekend with good weather where we could plow through some work my left eye might stop twitching.
Good news: We had a ton of help and got a lot done this weekend.
Bad news: The eye is still twitching.
We’ve actually been really lucky that the weather has held out this long, and I feel like I’m using up a lot of favors from the universe in asking that it holds out just a little bit longer, but we need just another couple of weeks to knock out the bulk of the siding.
We did get the back side of the house completely finished and caulked this weekend.
Getting this last piece up felt good. Except that I was too short to do it myself.
Then we stuck my mom up on the extra sturdy scaffolding and handed her a paintbrush.
Not only because we just couldn’t wait to see how it would look, but also because we’re quickly running out of time wherein the ambient temperature is above 50-degrees, and the small print on the stain label says the entire universe will implode if 1.) your house isn’t stained before the winter and 2.) you try to apply stain when it’s snowing. We’re trying to avert a galaxy-wide disaster here, okay?
Mom sort of paints wherever she feels like it. Regardless, she got a lot done and I’m hoping we’ll be able to put this side of the house completely in the “done” column soon.
We also got a good portion of the front/side of the house ready for siding, which I’m finding is more than half the battle.
The ledger running the length of the house is for our future deck. We actually sort of mis-read our deck plans, and it was supposed to end just after the three-window bump-out, but we were far enough along that we just decided to continue the deck to the end of the house. I mean, who ever says “Gosh, this deck is just too big, I wish we wouldn’t have added that last seven feet on to it…”?
In order to even put the first piece of siding on, we needed to have the following in place:
- Rubber flashing behind ledger
- Pressure-treated wood ledger
- Metal flashing on top of ledger
- Tar paper on inside and outside corners
- Outside corner pieces attached, made up of a 2×4 and 2×6 cut to length
- Inside corner pieces attached, made up of a 2×4 ripped in half
- All studs marked
- Horizontal marks for the siding overlap
- Any electrical, plumbing, or mechanical that runs through the studs marked so that someone (ahem) doesn’t drive a nail into the sink drain
It was great to have friends over this weekend to help take care of some of those details that would have been hard (and slow) for us to do alone.
Especially because when we walked out of our house Sunday morning we saw there had been a mass breakout of cattle from somewhere in the neighborhood, and being country-folk, we had use up some of our precious “working time” to go investigate.
Some other neighbors finally showed up and walked the cattle back to their home. Down the road.
You know, I can’t even believe I just typed that paragraph. Country living = not a joke.
One Response
Glad the cows got home safe. Wow, your siding looks great! I love, love, love it! I wish I had that siding on my house too. Stupid brick, I don’t get to pick any siding or colors or anything fun at all.
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