Siding Part 3: It’s beginning to look a lot like something!

Not Christmas, thank God. I’ll take the summer for now. Instead of garlands, we’re hanging clapboards. And they look good!

Hardieplank, just like any wood siding, goes in from the bottom up. And to start it you need a shim so that the first board slopes out properly. After that each board laps over the one below it. For the shim you need something about the thickness of the planks, but using fiber cement doesn’t work well because the cuts need to be primed and the small cut piece is prone to decay. I had the perfect thing though. My drip edge was cut from one 1×12. The vertical piece on the wall has one angled cut, then the off cut made the cap. But the cap has 2 angled cuts, so the off cut from the other one made a perfect little shim made of plastic, even with a nice little angle to it!

There is also window screen bent over the bottom of the air gap held in with these shims because bees can get in there.

And when the siding goes over this is looks clean and hidden and perfect.

There is a small gap between the siding and the drip cap, and the cap hides the big gap behind the siding from below.

Now the other critically important part is the trim around the windows. I wanted it to look (approximately) identical to the original even though this serves no purpose on today’s factory built pre-hung units. So I have a chunky sill that sits below the sill that came with the window and wide flat trim with a back band. The subsill overlaps about 3/4″ under the sill that’s part of the window so if any water gets between them it can drain out. This posed a problem. The plywood strips that we’re nailing the siding to are flush with the window, so the subsill conflicted with them. My dad and his friend (who were both awesome enough to help me with this) wanted me to end the sill on either side of the window and run the trim down on either side of it. I made a face, and the next day my dad and I dadoed the subsill.

Here you can see the notch.

And here you can see how right it looks this way. 

Now we still have to get the piece on the middle, which will be ripped to a custom width.

But we’re getting close! Especially since the side that sucked the most is done.

Seriously. Being on ladders in that narrow space was a huge pain. Now that the prep is all done and the unfinished sides aren’t this one, it should go faster. Yay progress!