Insulation - A Long Awaited Day!

First, and very important:  get a portable potty for the workers:

Today the insulation was installed throughout the entire house.  I can't believe how fast the guys did all that work in 2200 sq ft.

When I got home late in the evening and walked into the house, it was strangely quiet with the insulation absorbing all the sound.

Now, you can really see the shape and size of the rooms.

Dining room:                                                                   Kitchen:

Front entrance to great room:                                      Great room:

Looking from the great room to the front door:

Siding And Paint On The Roof Peaks At The Front of The House

More angled boards and another round vent at the front of the house.

The boards installed here have an angle on both ends:

The sun came out so I held an umbrella over Gerry while he finished hanging the boards in the small, tight area.   I painted the boards with two coats before they were hung so I only had to paint the final coat laying down.

This would have been a tricky area to transition over the peak of the roof using just one board so we hung a board on each side with a small seam at the peak which cannot be seen unless you are right there on the roof. 

I prepainted these boards with one coat before we hung them which made the painting easier in the long run.

Gerry's putting finish nails on the last piece:

Gerry suspended a board between the two roofs over the porch for me to sit on while painting the right side.

Next, we hung the shingles around the round vent.  Then I painted them.

  

Siding And Painting The Peaks At The Back Of The House

Gerry designed the roof lines in the front and back of the house with different heights on different planes instead of one large peak, to give it visual interest.

We started with the roof peaks at the back of the house since they get the most sun and the construction paper is only supposed to be exposed to the weather for 6 months max.

Gerry made a paper template to help me layout and cut the angels in each board. I laid out the siding on a large table inside the great room....with Fred's help, of course. 

After we sided both ends shown here, we started the next peak up and to the right.  

I finally got this board cut correctly on the third try.  Not because of the notched end--which was a perfect fit each time--but the overall length was too short the first two times.

Yeah, it's ready to hang!

Once we reached the roof line to the left each board had to be cut at an angel on both ends.  I had Gerry test fit each board then used it as a template to cut the next one up

The challenge with this area was the width of the roof we have to work on...just 20-inches wide. Gerry put up umbrellas to shade the area for me.

And we had to climb over the end of the scaffolding to get up there.

Once the sides were done, we started working on the shingles around the circular vent.
To lay out the shingles for the round vent we traced the vent, used geometry to find the center (I remembered the basic concept but Gerry knew how to use it!), then transferred the circle to the shingles using a large compass, one layer at a time.  It took much longer to do the vent circle that any other area.

I also decided to paint the shingles before hanging them because it's such a pain to paint the grooves between the shingles once they're on the wall.

Siding is hung and the shingles around the vent are done.

Now it's time to paint it all.  I used both the scaffolding and the ladder jacks to reach across the areas to paint--3 coats!

    

Exterior Painting

For a long time, I had three colors I was considering for the exterior of the house--medium gray, sage green, and medium taupe.  When I was driving around town I found a house similar to the style we're building (Cape Cod-ish) with an exterior color that I really liked.  I took a few pictures to show Gerry then we drove back to the house so he could see it in person.  We agreed it was a good color so I wrote the homeowners a note asking if they would share the brand and color of their house paint.  They called me!  I guess it's kind of a blue-green shade...more green than blue...and it looks different in different lighting throughout the day.  I painted 5 areas on walls facing different directions so I could see how it looked.  After a couple months (and Tech Trek duties), I finally had time to paint.

I started painting with flat paint and depending upon the lighting, it sometimes looked more blue-gray than green.  I also didn't really like the flat finish--it would be hard to clean and it was "flat"...duh...no dimension.  I didn't recall my inspiration house looking that way so I went back to check it out again.  That house's color looked much better than mine and it seemed to have a sheen that the flat paint did not have so I decided to try a satin finish.

 

Painting siding is a LOT of work!  All the white trim has to be cut in for every coat of paint.  I'm doing a minimum of three coats--one flat and 2 satin--on most of the walls and a fourth coat on the south and west facing walls that are exposed to the direct sun.

This is the east side of the shop. I started on the shop so I would get my "lessons learned" there instead of on the house.  

In this section, I cut in the edges as well as the bottom edge of each row before I painted the siding.

 

The shingles are also a hassle to paint.  I have to cut in the white trim, paint in between the shingles so the yellow primer of the board underneath does not show, and then paint the bottom edges.  Once that's all done. I paint the shingles themselves.  Repeat at least twice!

 

 Here's the bottom half of the wall and the shingles all painted!

Raymond helped me paint the sides of the house.  I cut in around the trim and he painted the "field."  This is the west side of the house:

 






















Gerry's brother, Butch, and his wife Liz visited for a few days so we had a dinner party in the shop 

Exterior Siding On The Shop

The exterior paper was hung just in time before the rain started.  It can withstand the weather for 6 months.

During the summer, I took several vacation days to hang siding on the shop and the house.
I must say, I'm pretty good at hanging exterior siding.  There are a couple great tools that make it pretty fool proof once you learn how to use them.  We're using Hardi Board, which is a cement product, and it already has a harvest yellow primer.


The power shear is a must-have.  It has three blades--the center blade has the cutting action.  It zips through the cement as if it were paper and there is very little dust.  It removes about 1/8" of material which allows for the clearance needed between the sides of the board and the trim.  Measure twice...sometimes three times, the cut!

Start the installation at the bottom of the wall and work your way across the wall then up, making sure each board is level and aligned with the rest of the row.  The two Gator Clips slide under a board and are adjustable; all I had to do was lay the next board right on top and start nailing. This made it easy for me to hang the 12' boards by myself.

Fred was always a willing helper when it came to holding down the boards.

The east side of shop with sliding door:

 

The front of the shop:

 

Every seam had to be caulked to prevent water from getting behind the boards.  Definitely not my favorite thing to do!

This is the back of the shop.  The bottom half is now completely except for the shingles. I still have to do the siding around the eyebrow windows on the upper area.

Then I started hanging the shingles on the front of the shop under the two windows.  I thought that was going to be the easy part, but it turned out to be a hassle.  The shingled area is 5' wide and the shingles come in 4' lengths, but only two different patterns. They were not long enough to easily stagger the patterns and seams so I had to lay it out on plywood and put the pieces together like a puzzle.  We may switch to individual shingles for the house.  It will take longer to nail them up, but it will be easier to mix up the sizes to avoid overlapping seams.
 

 

The west side of the shop has two windows and a door on the bottom half, and a round window in the center of the top half.

 

We still have to put siding on the shop's dormer windows, but I don't want to work on the roof  and I certainly don't want Gerry up there.  It's pretty steep on the front side, and too close to the edge for comfort.  We may need to get different scaffolding to do the job.