Cover Me

Siding update! Well, I have turned the corner, so to speak, and have run both the north and east sides as far up as I can reach with the current scaffolding. Here, I need to put my flashing above the windows and door before I can go any higher. On the north side I am completely finishing the siding as I go up, painting and all, so that I don't have to rebuild the scaffolding, so it is taking a little longer. Allen came and helped me this weekend so it went some faster. We had a little excitement Saturday though that I could have done without. We were on the north side working and I started noticing a bunch of these little bugs flying everywhere. Not that unusual; but after a time there was a lot more. I walked around to the east side to go in the house and there were hundreds of these little things everywhere and they looked like flying ants. Allen said it appeared that they were coming from the east and then it occurred to the both of us; we were in the midst of a termite colony swarm. I ran in the house and they were coming in under the door and seemingly through cracks in the windows too. If you don't live in the South I will tell you that nothing strikes fear in a homeowners heart down here like the word "termite". Maybe "tornado" but it's about the same. So, we spent the next 2 hours vacuuming termites out of the house and spraying and caulking, anything to get rid of those horrible creatures. No sign of them today.
Someone had asked about how I was running the siding around the windows since I had run the trim first. The siding is just cut out to the profile of the window and trim and then very carefully lifted into place and nailed. This is a piece waiting to be installed.
This is the same piece installed. If you are careful you can get a pretty tight fit. I will caulk these joints and paint and you'll never know the difference.
I have several plugs on the deck and around the house that I had to accommodate. When I was running the circuit, I just drilled a hole in the exterior wall and roughed out about a foot of wire in the approximate area I wanted the plug. I did not set a box yet. When I started running the siding I then could see where each piece was going to hit and could then put the box in the wall making sure that it was going to hit fully within one piece of siding. You don't want it to hit in between two pieces; it makes putting a cover on a royal pain. The siding is nailed every 16" on the studs. When I located the studs I just plumbed a line all the way up (that's the black line on the Tyvek) so that I would know where they were as I was nailing. I am using 4d galvanized nails with a small head for the siding. I am using 8d galvanized casing nails (no head) for the trim. You have to be careful with galvanized nails. I think that it is easier for your hammer to slip off the nail as you are driving it and hit the board. It's bad because if it slips off and you hit your nice, (expensive) cypress trim and leave a pecker mark, it will cause you to talk very ugly for a few minutes, so be aware of this.
Just for the record so that everyone does not think that I am a complete moron, I wanted to make a note of something. Pablo left a comment on the last post saying I should write a novel because I had a good theme in that post. I asked what that theme was; I wasn't sure. Well, I know what the main theme of the post was but I have noticed that a lot of the comments I get are not about what the main topic was, since I tend to ramble at the end of a post, such as now. That post had several ideas in it so Pablo could have, theoretically, been speaking of one of the others. Ha! I'm still dense and it takes me a while sometimes to think about things.


*Bruce Springsteen