Hi
I had high hopes for the past weekend. I had finally persuaded my husband that the expensive process of putting the siding I wanted on our cottage did not have to be done in one fell swoop. We could do it one outside wall at a time.
The cottage was built in the '40's and sided with asbestos shingles, which are a shade of green that makes me think of hospital worker garb. The longer I looked at it, the more I grew to hate it. About 10 years ago, we painted it a cheerful and bright white. Now, the paint is flaking all over the place and makes the poor cottage look even more decrepit than it really is. Scraping the paint to clean it enough to re-paint is not a healthy option. Removing the asbestos shingles is not an option - for both health and cost reasons (disposal fees for asbestos are quite rightly expensive). So I want to cover the whole unsightly thing with cedar board and batten siding. First wall would be the one that faces the road and is now quite visible from the road due to losing all those trees in a storm in Feb. '06.
We reckoned this weekend was the opportune moment. We ordered the wood from a local sawmill guy. We bought a nail gun and a big box of nails. We recruited my eldest son to come to aid the project. Second eldest works on weekends, so he was unable to join in. Eldest asked if he could recruit a couple of friends for the project. It all looked eminantly do-able to have one end of the cottage covered in a weekend. Amateurs we are, but we have pulled off many a project this way in the past.
We arrived about 8:00 p.m. on Friday. I headed over to the sawmill to collect the wood. It wasn't all quite ready for me, but the sawmill guy got a few machines going and he and I finished off the last boards and loaded them in the min-van. He then asked if they were going to be vertical or horizontal. I said vertical and he asked if I knew how to join them to avoid rot. I denied any such knowledge, so he set up one more saw and showed me how to make the cuts on an angle to let the overlaps join correctly.
I finally arrived back at the cottage and imparted this knowledge to my husband, who looked me in the eye and denied that he possessed a saw that could do this. We offloaded the lumber and I went to bed, hoping to arise early enough to go find one the next morning, borrow it and be back before the workers arose.
Now, a prudent worker for a Work Weekend⢠would have had a couple of beers and gone to bed early too, no? I am not surrounded by prudent people. Apparently the workers carried on until at least 4:00 a.m.
I arose at 6:00 a.m., did the prep work for a massive breakfast for the workers and then sallied forth to locate a saw that would do the angled cuts we needed. By 8:30 a.m. I had the saw (borrowed from an equally early-rising neighbour) back and set up. I rousted the troops and got them fed and going.
Now, one of my son's friends understood the concept clearly. He was tired but was cheerful. The other had failed to grasp the concept of Work Weekend⢠altogether. He wandered about in a surly and grumpy fashion, took unannounced breaks and wandered by now and then to suggest that we should all go for a swim or something because he was bored.
However, work proceeded apace and we got all the set-up for actually nailing the cedar onto the wall done by early evening. (Strapping nailed to the walls, fixtures attached to the wall removed, and tar paper covering the entire wall) Another neighbour came by to watch the work (this always happens when there is a project - although ours may be cause for more amusement than others, we are all nosy about what is going on in the vicinity). He asked to see the new toy nail gun and then asked if we knew that galvanized nails were what was needed for the project, because he knew from bitter experience of his own that the regular sort would rust. A quick check of the box of nails revealed that it was not, in fact, the right sort of nails. By this time, the local hardware stores were all closed. Ok, I knew what I was doing early the next morning.
Did the prudent workers decide to rest in preparation for the work of the next day? A crokinole tournament was organized and there was considerable merriment. I took myself to bed at midnight, but the others carried on.
I got up first, made a quick phone call to two of the three possible sources of more nails, in order of distance to drive. The first didn't open until 10:00 a.m. - scratch that. The second opened at 9:00 a.m., so I phoned then and acertained that they did, in fact, have that size of nail in galvanized form. I drove the 20 miles to the store, asked for the box of nails and almost bought the wrong kind anyway because the store clerk brought me the wrong ones, caught myself, and drove back triumphantly with the right ones. By the time I got the crew going, it was 10:30 a.m.
The crew was tired. The crew boss, my husband, was particularly tired and grumpy. I could digress for some time on a rant about how men of a certain age should just acknowledge that they no longer possess the vigour of youth and not try to out-stay-up-late men in their early 20's, but suffice it to say that he is stubborn about such things.
The work proceeded very slowly, as any error on the wood cuts (or the measuring that preceeded each cut) was visible only after the board was nailed on, which meant tearing it off and cutting again. Grimly watching expensive boards be mangled is not a cheering sort of thing either. More could be procured, but not on a Sunday.
It was hot. It was humid. There was a thunderstorm in the forecast and we were having that calm before the storm. There were blackflies. There were mosquitos. The flesh was weak and the spirit was increasingly less willing as the day dragged on.
What saved us was the storm. It had not arrived at the cottage yet, but it did strike somewhere on the Bruce Peninsula with sufficient force to knock out the power. No power = no power tools. We all sighed internally with relief. Now, if we gave up, it wasn't because we were weak and foolish. It was because we had to stop. This sort of psychological spin is important.
We cleaned up the work area, battened down for the incoming storm, locked up and then had the joy of being followed home by the storm and passing in and out of a few of them on the way home.
The siding is on a full one third of one wall of the cottage. And that was the easy one third, before we had to start notching out for the door, window, vent and electric meter.
What odds we do better next weekend?
I had high hopes for the past weekend. I had finally persuaded my husband that the expensive process of putting the siding I wanted on our cottage did not have to be done in one fell swoop. We could do it one outside wall at a time.
The cottage was built in the '40's and sided with asbestos shingles, which are a shade of green that makes me think of hospital worker garb. The longer I looked at it, the more I grew to hate it. About 10 years ago, we painted it a cheerful and bright white. Now, the paint is flaking all over the place and makes the poor cottage look even more decrepit than it really is. Scraping the paint to clean it enough to re-paint is not a healthy option. Removing the asbestos shingles is not an option - for both health and cost reasons (disposal fees for asbestos are quite rightly expensive). So I want to cover the whole unsightly thing with cedar board and batten siding. First wall would be the one that faces the road and is now quite visible from the road due to losing all those trees in a storm in Feb. '06.
We reckoned this weekend was the opportune moment. We ordered the wood from a local sawmill guy. We bought a nail gun and a big box of nails. We recruited my eldest son to come to aid the project. Second eldest works on weekends, so he was unable to join in. Eldest asked if he could recruit a couple of friends for the project. It all looked eminantly do-able to have one end of the cottage covered in a weekend. Amateurs we are, but we have pulled off many a project this way in the past.
We arrived about 8:00 p.m. on Friday. I headed over to the sawmill to collect the wood. It wasn't all quite ready for me, but the sawmill guy got a few machines going and he and I finished off the last boards and loaded them in the min-van. He then asked if they were going to be vertical or horizontal. I said vertical and he asked if I knew how to join them to avoid rot. I denied any such knowledge, so he set up one more saw and showed me how to make the cuts on an angle to let the overlaps join correctly.
I finally arrived back at the cottage and imparted this knowledge to my husband, who looked me in the eye and denied that he possessed a saw that could do this. We offloaded the lumber and I went to bed, hoping to arise early enough to go find one the next morning, borrow it and be back before the workers arose.
Now, a prudent worker for a Work Weekend⢠would have had a couple of beers and gone to bed early too, no? I am not surrounded by prudent people. Apparently the workers carried on until at least 4:00 a.m.
I arose at 6:00 a.m., did the prep work for a massive breakfast for the workers and then sallied forth to locate a saw that would do the angled cuts we needed. By 8:30 a.m. I had the saw (borrowed from an equally early-rising neighbour) back and set up. I rousted the troops and got them fed and going.
Now, one of my son's friends understood the concept clearly. He was tired but was cheerful. The other had failed to grasp the concept of Work Weekend⢠altogether. He wandered about in a surly and grumpy fashion, took unannounced breaks and wandered by now and then to suggest that we should all go for a swim or something because he was bored.
However, work proceeded apace and we got all the set-up for actually nailing the cedar onto the wall done by early evening. (Strapping nailed to the walls, fixtures attached to the wall removed, and tar paper covering the entire wall) Another neighbour came by to watch the work (this always happens when there is a project - although ours may be cause for more amusement than others, we are all nosy about what is going on in the vicinity). He asked to see the new toy nail gun and then asked if we knew that galvanized nails were what was needed for the project, because he knew from bitter experience of his own that the regular sort would rust. A quick check of the box of nails revealed that it was not, in fact, the right sort of nails. By this time, the local hardware stores were all closed. Ok, I knew what I was doing early the next morning.
Did the prudent workers decide to rest in preparation for the work of the next day? A crokinole tournament was organized and there was considerable merriment. I took myself to bed at midnight, but the others carried on.
I got up first, made a quick phone call to two of the three possible sources of more nails, in order of distance to drive. The first didn't open until 10:00 a.m. - scratch that. The second opened at 9:00 a.m., so I phoned then and acertained that they did, in fact, have that size of nail in galvanized form. I drove the 20 miles to the store, asked for the box of nails and almost bought the wrong kind anyway because the store clerk brought me the wrong ones, caught myself, and drove back triumphantly with the right ones. By the time I got the crew going, it was 10:30 a.m.
The crew was tired. The crew boss, my husband, was particularly tired and grumpy. I could digress for some time on a rant about how men of a certain age should just acknowledge that they no longer possess the vigour of youth and not try to out-stay-up-late men in their early 20's, but suffice it to say that he is stubborn about such things.
The work proceeded very slowly, as any error on the wood cuts (or the measuring that preceeded each cut) was visible only after the board was nailed on, which meant tearing it off and cutting again. Grimly watching expensive boards be mangled is not a cheering sort of thing either. More could be procured, but not on a Sunday.
It was hot. It was humid. There was a thunderstorm in the forecast and we were having that calm before the storm. There were blackflies. There were mosquitos. The flesh was weak and the spirit was increasingly less willing as the day dragged on.
What saved us was the storm. It had not arrived at the cottage yet, but it did strike somewhere on the Bruce Peninsula with sufficient force to knock out the power. No power = no power tools. We all sighed internally with relief. Now, if we gave up, it wasn't because we were weak and foolish. It was because we had to stop. This sort of psychological spin is important.
We cleaned up the work area, battened down for the incoming storm, locked up and then had the joy of being followed home by the storm and passing in and out of a few of them on the way home.
The siding is on a full one third of one wall of the cottage. And that was the easy one third, before we had to start notching out for the door, window, vent and electric meter.
What odds we do better next weekend?
![[Image: smile.gif]](http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/images/smilies/smile.gif)
At least, one side is done. ![[Image: rolleye.gif]](http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/images/smilies/rolleye.gif)
I will spare you all the details of this weekend's efforts. On the bright side, the weather was great. It was sunny and clear, although there was a bit of excitement on the trip up, as a thunderstorm knocked out the lights at a critical intersection, making for a 2 kilometre backup of traffic.![[Image: sidingbefore.jpg]](http://ca.geocities.com/shadow123@rogers.com/sidingbefore.jpg)
![[Image: sidingmiddle.jpg]](http://ca.geocities.com/shadow123@rogers.com/sidingmiddle.jpg)
![[Image: sidingafter.jpg]](http://ca.geocities.com/shadow123@rogers.com/sidingafter.jpg)
![[Image: nod.gif]](http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/images/smilies/nod.gif)
![[Image: lol.gif]](http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/images/smilies/lol.gif)
We had been getting a whiff of skunk near that shed all spring (causing a bit of alarm for my poor skunk-phobic husband). We finally decided to empty the shed completely so we could take whatever was holding that lingering odor away to the dump. And the culprit was dead under the floorboards. 
I have discovered that I 