Siding Project

Good Morning friends! I am planning on doing a few more posts on the old colonial and even adding a few recipes in the next few weeks as we continue to unpack, organize and start to decorate the new home! I am hoping to post some stuff on the new house in about two weeks or so. Although I won’t be posting anything too dramatic because the hubs and I promised the kids no house projects for at least 6 months! I did remove a few prickly bushes out of the front walkway, does that count as a project? So I thought I’d take a walk down memory lane and share with you the BIG siding project from last summer.   This is what the colonial looked like before we started:

When we bought the colonial we knew that eventually the exterior was going to need some help. We liked the cedar shake siding but the previous owners had used a lot of caulk to fill in the cracks and the caulk actually was turning gray while the shakes were still white. The shakes were in rough shape and some were rotting, chipped off or had an alligator skin look going on. The shakes were supposed to be stained and not painted but they were painted and we really didn’t have the money to replace them. One of our options was vinyl siding, it’s affordable, pretty maintenance free and we he could do it himself! WOO HOO! We briefly considered doing vinyl shakes but the cost went up significantly and that just wasn’t in the budget, maybe in 15 years it will be.   The hubs  is quite handy and has done many wonderful projects in our houses but he has never touched a vinyl siding project well that is until this one.
The first part was easy, removal of the cedar shakes.  Well easy until my hubby  had to get on a ladder, he eventually conquered his fear of the ladder which was a bonus to the siding project.  We have a wonderful neighbor that loved the peaks of our house and would come and do all the work up high so my handsome hubby didn’t have to.

   I think 3 weeks of the summer were devoted to the removal of the double layers of cedar shakes.  The shakes had about 20 nails in each piece, they would splinter into many small pieces and didn’t come off very easily. We have some very awesome friends and people from church that would just show up and lend a hand! THANK YOU!
We rented a dumpster that took up most of our driveway and made for an interesting conversation piece.

After ripping off the shakes the tar paper was the only thing protecting our house from the elements.  This was one of the rainiest summers on record where we live and I like to think it’s because we had an exterior project.  The wind ripped  some of the tar paper off and it made exterior of our house look like it had recently been on fire and the inside of our house felt like a fire because black and sunshine=hot!  We didn’t have central air because that went kaput during the kitchen remodel when Mr. A hooked it up, oops!  (He really is handy, that was just one oops.)   After a few weeks of people asking if our house had been on fire and taking the kids to the grocery store to cool off, the house wrap and  pink insulation panels went up.  Progress!!!!

When we started this project towards the end of June I don’t think we had any clue that in the middle of September we would still be working on it! Although we did take two weeks of vacation in August, Mr. A did not touch the siding once during those two weeks!  He deserved a vacation,  he worked almost every night after work until dark and on weekends, all summer while the kids and I were off at the grocery store park or getting ice cream. We also had many friends, neighbors and some family who contributed time and energy on our project.   I hate to think where we would be without there help!

We finally finished the vinyl on the house in early October, thank goodness we still had nice warm and sunny days.  Sometimes we’ve had snow in October, you never know what you’re going to get in the Midwest!  The garage had two sides that needed to be completed and those were done a few weeks ago, just in time to sell our house!  The final project is the pediment and sides around the front door. In the next few pictures they are not painted but it’s the best I could do for this post.

I am hoping that our neighbors will send us a picture of our house when the front is painted so we can update this post!  So that’s it, the really super long and intense siding project that would not have been possible without our neighbors, family and church friends helping us out! I was hoping to add shutters this summer and repaint the front door but we moved before I could do that. 

One more time, the before and after: