Siding begun. Lots of pictures.

The first thing I noticed when I got around to starting the siding today was that this apparently happened at some point.  I am surprised it is still standing to be honest.  Yes, there is a leg missing and the other two on that side are folded over.  So I fixed that up.


I had to come up with a slightly different strapping scheme, and use a block to get the strap out over top of the wrap.  It worked quite well.


The house had shifted, likely from Matt wiggling around on the roof so much.  It needed to be tilted back as well now.  This resulted in my needing to find a new anchor point to strap to.  Enter the tractor.  Since I wasn't sure how long the tractor would be stuck as a giant weight, I also mowed the yard.  Since we have already hit the 30's on multiple occasions, I am hoping this is the last mowing for the year.  I didn't finish the front (ran out of gas) but managed to get it back up the hill.




It was quite an adventure trying to figure out how to put up siding by myself.  It took me three tries to get a system that worked.  The first try I strapped the bottom of the sheets to the ladder and leaned them against the wall.  The ladder was not a good enough anchor and fell over.  So my second attempt was to strap them to me.  I didn't fall over, but every time I moved to nail something, the boards shifted and went out of alignment.  The third attempt was to make a scaffold out of cinder blocks and rest the sheets on that.  That worked.  It is still slow, but it works.  The earlier sheets took me about a half hour to get them on, but by the end of the day I had cut it down to just under 15 minutes a sheet.  Still slow, but tolerable.

This is what the scaffold looks like. I could easily fit the ladder over it


It lined the sheets up pretty well.


One issue I had was curling.  Not sure if it is because I am more familiar with the really thick T1-11 which doesn't exhibit this problem, but apparently if you leave it in the sun it curls.  Really really badly.  The top sheet had curled prior, but when I removed it and took the sheet underneath off, the sheet that was now exposed went from being perfectly flat in the stack (even once the weight was removed) to curling so bad it held itself up in a matter of a half hour.


It was rather hard to use like that.


After that fiasco, I decided that there would be no more curls under my watch.  The pile is now clamped.


I got the whole wall done.  It looks pretty nice.  The wall is rock solid too.


Not a great job cutting out the door though.


I have three inches on each end that aren't covered.  I haven't decided yet if I am going to get really fat trim to deal with it or just cut strips.  The fat trim sounds easier and is one less sheet of T1-11 I have to buy.


It is supposed to start raining tomorrow, so I covered the pile of siding, it was curling bad enough on its own, I don't want to give it a reason to curl.  Hopefully the bucket of nails under the tarp will push all the water away, since the tarp wasn't long enough to cover the whole pile.  The uncovered portion is under the car port.


My make shift door.  now that the siding is complete, I can install the actual front door, I just ran out of time.


Time is definitely pressing.  It looks like fall at least is coming very early.  Usually trees don't start to change for another week or two, but they are already starting.  The colors in the picture are kind of muted since I took it after sunset, but they are definitely changing.  There are a lot of them starting too, not just the sickly trees.