Priming the Siding

On Wednesday morning, a man in a truck arrived and we unloaded this pile of boards:

That's what a great big pile of custom-milled redwood siding looks like.

We spent a bit of time preparing this week for spending this whole weekend both priming the siding and getting the bottom of the house ready to have it installed.

This morning, we threw together some extra sawhorses from scrap wood.

First a test one to make sure the method was good.

Then we made an assembly line to put together three more.

With those, a pair we borrowed from a neighbor, and our regular two, we figured we were pretty set for sawhorses.

The process was pretty simple: prime a side, let it dry, then turn it over and prime the other side. Somewhere in there prime the edges.

This meant we had a lot of time with boards lying around waiting to be dry enough, but that worked out OK.

By the end of the day we'd gone through about 2/3 of the big pile.

We had stacked the primed siding on the truck to get it out of the way. With everything moved out of the driveway at the end of the day we could just back the truck in and put it all away very neatly.

And tomorrow we are back at it, starting at 10am and going (possibly) until sunset. If we make progress like we did today we'll get it all primed and can start working on applying the building paper to the base of the house. Old houses were not built with building paper but the current code demands it, so there you have it. And we have a ridiculous number of wall penetrations to flash around because of somebody's great idea to run the irrigation through the basement. What kind of dummy made that decision?

Much thanks to our helpers today: Betsy, Elaine, Stefani, Paula, and Steve. And to Gene and Elaine for skipping work Wednesday to help us unload the siding from the delivery truck (as with most building materials, it was tailgate delivery).

This might actually get done on time.

posted by ayse on 09/06/14