Friday Wrap-up

The siding is essentially done as of this morning. There are two little triangular areas that'll take me an hour or so to finish, but rest is done. Feels great, looks great.

The last wall of siding, with special guest

Work-site lights make siding in the dark possible while Parker plays air-clapboard

The last wall to be sided

Nancy working away painting nail-heads

Parker getting comfortable with his friend Tablesaw

My best friend Parker is here (all the way from California) this week helping out as we come into the very last bits of the siding project. He's been working with Joe and me since Tuesday and his presence has been crucial to our staying on the schedule we set for ourselves.

Joe was gone today, but Parker and I worked a super-long day today and now there are just a few small places where we need to finish up the clapboard work, but all the big stuff is done. Tomorrow we'll clean up and start to sort our selves out for whatever is next on the list...

Weekend Catch-Up

This picture shows the detail that we worked out running under the roof overhang. I'm wondering if maybe we should paint it some slightly different color to call it out a little or just leave it as it is

Adam stuck around for some more work on Saturday morning and we pretty much wrapped up the west end of the house. The rest of the weekend consisted of caulking, priming, and painting in order to be able to have the staging freed up for more clapboarding tomorrow morning. Nancy and I also painted some more clapboard in order to be well stocked for the next few day's work.

Today I gave the sunburst it's final coat of paint as a honey bee warmed herself in the morning sun.

Sunny end to a cloudy week

You can't really see it here, but under the overhang there are two horizontal pieces of trim that bring the top of the clapboard siding down a little. The lower piece is bracketed on each end by the curved pieces at either end. I like what it does to the overall look. (Click photo to embiggen the view)

We got almost all the way there with the west wall, but the truth is there are a bunch of trim details as you work up around the dormer that make it a little cumbersome at the end. I did my best to work a few steps ahead of Adam and Joe, but in the end was barely doing so.

I'm really pleased with how all the details are coming together, especially since I really didn't have a plan going into the whole siding project. It was working out that corner post cap with a curve that really set the pattern and freed me up to make the rest happen.

Joe is off to a historical reenactor's weekend and Adam, Nancy and I are headed to the contra dance in Burlington. Tomorrow, Adam and I are going to do a little Saturday work...

Sunburst switcheroo

Joe, putting drip-edge on the shelf detail over the door

Yesterday's version of the sunburst colors

Today's rendition

( l to r:) Hear no Evil, see no Evil, and speak no Evil

The siding at the end of today's work

Yesterday when I painted the sunburst I started with yellow and then did a band or orange up from one side and over to the other. It looked cool and every thing when it was done, but both Nancy and I thought that the yellow staring band kinda blended into the cream colored trim, so today I repainted it starting with orange. We all agree it looks much better. What do you think?

Joe and Adam have been making good progress on the west wall and are now above the windows and doors, which slow the process down. Hopefully tomorrow we'll be pretty close to done on this section of the house. Its been great having Adam here in addition to Joe.

How its working this week

Adam is back this week, and he and Joe are working together as a team to continue putting up the siding. My job has been to work around them getting all the pieces of trim and such in place so that they can work without any big stops to take care of details.

Getting the door trim in place was part of this work, and today I painted the gable end triangle of the south wall in order to free up the staging so that it will be available for Joe and Adam tomorrow. They've started on the west wall and it looks like they'll need the staging pretty quick.

The very last bit of painting I did today was to paint alternate rays of the sunburst. Joe has this groovy orange cycling shirt which I spied as a good candidate for the right orange, so I borrowed the shirt and took it down to the paint store and tried to match up the color. I think it worked out pretty nice.

South wall (virtually) done

South facade clapboarded

Working out the detail under the overhang. I might change this slightly, then again, I may not

Joe nailing the last piece in place

We finished off the south wall of the house on Friday and it looks great. The house is getting it's proper set of clothes and its been a long wait to get the satisfaction of seeing this finally happen; its one of those moments again where you get to match the conceptual with the actual.

Sheetrock Update

Joe and I have been concentrating all our efforts on getting the siding up, but while we've been busy there has been a crew of three guys, Duane, Larry and John, who have been working hard at completing the sheetrock work in the house. They finished yesterday with a final sanding.

We've really left the house to them over the last couple of weeks, so in that respect their work has happened a little off of my radar, but day-by-day there has been a steady sense of shape and clarity to the walls and corners and such throughout the house. With the sanding work done there is this sense of the walls and ceilings as great expanses of flat, clear area. For the first time its occurring to me that with our crisp corners and neatly completed walls we have to be careful in a new way. We can't just throw a screw in the wall to hang something, or bump a long piece of wood on a corner as we carry it inside.

I guess this is a sign that we're getting somewhere.

Paint colors

Our color scheme in action

Clapboards are going up on the south side of the house

The house whose color scheme we copied

Nancy and I did a lot of work trying to work out the paint colors for the house last fall before we put in the order for our windows, wanting them to all work as a unit. In the end we ended up finding a house in the next town whose colors we admired and ended up meeting the owners who lent us some of their paint. We just used what they had already worked out.

Colors are hard to figure out, at least for me. I know what I like when I see it, but I have a hard time seeing a color in my mind's eye before and knowing that its what I want.

We completed the clapboarding up the back of the north wall but before we took down all the scaffolding we wanted to get the triangular area of the gable end completely painted so we won't have to go back up there until the next time we need to paint, which will hopefully be a good number of years.

For the record we are technically staining the house rather then painting. I'm not quite sure of the difference, but when it comes to having to repaint using stain means we won't have to scrape first; we'll just be able to go over what's there. The downside of stain is that it needs to be recoated sooner then paint would. I hate scraping but enjoy painting, so the trade-offs seem fine to me.

If you are curious our exterior colors are:

Trim: Benjamin Moore "Mascarpone" semi-gloss
Clapboards: Benjamin Moore "Tree Moss" flat
Window frames and roof: Black

The end of the week

It was our goal to get this end of the house done by Friday and we almost made it, but not quite. We're in the home stretch.

Over the weekend I'll be catching up with painting the siding we've just put up.

Going up...

The second floor with sheetrock complete

We continued our clapboard work today, making good headway up the gable-end north wall. Our goal is to finish this wall by the end of the week. We'll see...

Meanwhile the sheetrocking crew has completed the sheetrock hanging phase of their work. Today they began taping joints and installing corner bead and will be continuing this work. Its been a rapid transformation and the house feels, sounds, and looks quite different then it did a week or so ago.

Let there be siding!

The results of our first day of siding

Joe and I going at it

A steady rain yesterday meant I worked alone painting all the clapboards you see in this picture...

Today Joe and I went to town on the siding project. After a little time getting ourselves set up we started putting up our cottage-grade spruce clapboard siding installed with a 2 1/2" reveal.

With any new process there are always a few kinks to work out, so it was a conscious decision to start at the back of the house in order to work out any issues that needed to be solved, which proved to be a smart way to go because after we got three or four courses up I noticed our spacing was a little off from the marks we'd made as guidelines. We looked at what was going on, solved the issue and adjusted the next few courses to bring us back into alignment with the marks.

It is SO satisfying to finally see the outside of the house coming to life. The colors of the window, trim and clapboards look great. We'll be doing lots more of this over the next few weeks.

East Gable Wall-The last

We've been seeing great flocks of geese flying south. (Click on the first photo and you'll see the line of them across the sky).

Since the last post, we raised the kneewall along the west edge of the second floor (seen in the last photo above). Today we put up the last of the three gable walls (over the kitchen on the second floor), which is the last exterior wall of any serious magnatude; we have partial kneewalls to fill in once the roof framing take shape, but that'll be quick fill-in stuff. So, this means we are effectively onto building the roof, and to that end we put up a pair of rafters at the end of the day on the lower roof over the kitchen. It feels like we're turning a corner where we'll soon be done with all the framing and moving onto the next phase, which will be the trim, siding, windows and doors--but we're not there yet. The roof is it's own project and will offer some interesting challenges to make the roof framing come together correctly. Stay tuned.

Siding details

Joe had to deal with some stuff around home today so we ended up taking the day off, which I was fine with. It gave me a chance to putter and take care of some neglected tasks. Part of what I did was play around with the siding detail along the rake of the roof. If you read the last post you'll know we were struggling with the height of the house; one way to visually lower things is to add a frieze along the rake. The frieze is the horizontal band that runs under the rafters across the top of the wall.

I did a couple of mock-ups. The photo above shows about a foot of the frieze to give me a sense of the size and how I'd want to change it. If we go ahead with this detail, imagine the wooden parts running leftwards in a line to the back corner, under the rafters.

The first version I built up was clearly too short and the shelf went way too far out. This is shown in this photo(click on photos for a better view):
The next version extends further down the wall and brings the shelf in a bit. Its better, but I think the shelf needs to be even smaller and the band that the shelf support lands on should be not so wide.

Nancy has long been advocating for some detail that would liven up the exterior and I think this may serve that goal. I've been sort of in favor of a more austere look, but I'm finding that the prospect of doing all this detail stuff is really fun.

C'est bon

Yesterday, after some delay while affixing the sunburst and surrounding clapboard, we stood up the second gable wall. It was a dramatic moment as the scope of the house really has begun to take form. Event though the rest of the roof still needs to be built, you can now envision the form. As soon as the wall was up we launched into building the kneewall and worked until dusk when it was nearly completed.

Since the first gable wall went up we've been grappling with the height of the house. Having lived in the yurt for many years and only having the low garage to compare to, the house seems quite tall. At first I was nonchalant about this, but after the second wall went up yesterday, something gave and my confidence broke. We spent much of last evening, and some time in the wee hours, anguishing over it and imagining what our course might be. By morning I had devised a means to lift and cut the two gable walls in order to lower the whole second floor kneewall height. I also decided it would be useful to call Harrison"Snapp" Snapp of Weather Hill Company, who lives nearby and is a friendly guy, to get some experienced perspective. Weather Hill's stock-in-trade is doing historical building well, so I knew he'd be able to see it as both a builder and someone who is tuned into proportion and detail. As luck would have it, he and his wife Valerie were headed out of town for vacation but were able to stop by and look things over with us. Snapp was able to reassure us that we're doing fine and that the proportions work. Beyond that, they were able to suggest ways that we might treat the siding such that the large area of clapboard along the upper west wall might come down a bit, or appear slightly lower, with a freize board.

I now need to do some work to see what will look good before we start on the siding.