Days 61-64: Siding

So far I have been thrilled with all the colors and finishes we have chosen. I was nervous at first, because it was really hard making such large scale decisions from such little itty bitty samples. But seeing the siding go up really helped affirm our choices. On May 20th they started with the straight siding on the back of the house. The color is called Tuscan Clay, which is the darkest color available for this particular product. I really wanted something a bit darker, but I'll take what I can get. And instead of the standard 4-5 inch dutch lap siding, we chose a triple 3 inch clapboard siding. This is truer historically, when they used skinnier strips of ceder clapboard as siding. You see it a lot on older homes from the early 20th century.

When I arrived with my camera on the second day of installation (May 21st), they had pretty much finished the back side of the house and had started on the sides. Dustin and Jerry were busy working with the crew to hang the brackets as well.




Also going on that day was the connecting of the water and sewer lines from the house to the street. They dug two big trenches, laid the pipe, and then back-filled it a couple days later. The owner of the backhoe service's last name was Owens. So I pointed to the guy's truck and said, "Look Owen! It's Owens Backhoe Service!" Owen got really excited and said, "I didn't know I had my own backhoe service!"


I mentioned in the previous post that we met with the siding guys a couple days before they started. The whole purpose was to work out some of the more unusual design challenges our house posed. As part of the design, I wanted extra large roof overhangs of 24 inches. And I did not want a flat soffit mounted under the eaves where the roof slope continues past the edge of the house. I wanted the soffit to follow the angle of the roof pitch. So they discussed with us how this would be done and cleared up some questions regarding the transitions between the perpendicular gables. When I designed this house, I had no idea how complicated this would all get! But I knew how I wanted it to look, so I tried to make sure the guys knew exactly what we wanted.

Example of gable transition.
Example of angled soffit.
The only compromise I had to make was on the back of the house. They could not do an angled soffit there because that bit of roof between the first and second floor is just a faux roof, to make it appear as thought the main gable of the house continues all the way across the back of the house. It is not tied in structurally, so it had 2x4 supports connecting it to the house.

Roof structure at the back of the house.

Flat soffit installed.
Another design detail that was important to me was the extra large 1x4 and 1x6 trim around the windows and doors. The 4 inch trim is for the sides and bottom of the windows, and the 6 inch trim goes across the top of the window with a 2 inch overhang on each side. The affect would be like post and lintel construction. Also, we wanted a 1x12 trim strip between the first and second floors to break up the monotony of the siding. This 12 inch band of trim was to run across the front porch and wrap around each gabled side, including the garage gable. Originally, I had that band lined up with the beam over the front porch. From there it would just rest on the top pieces of the window trim. So when they asked us where we wanted the 12 inch trim, I told them just to line it up with the bottom of the porch beam and continue it at that level all the way around. Little did I know that the size of that beam was substantially bigger than the original plan. The bottom of the beam was about 3.5 inches lower than the top of the window trim. Needless to say, I was shocked to show up a couple of days later and see this:

Cut off window trim.


I know it probably doesn't look that bad to the average onlooker, but I was NOT happy with it. It's not how I designed it and it's not how it was on the drawings. But I was really mad at myself for not checking the level of that porch beam with the rest of the house. I would have been able to tell immediately that it was going to interfere with the top of the window trim. So, after that discovery was made, we told the siding guys to not put up any of the 1x12 on the front of the house until we figured things out. Honestly, I held little hope of them changing it. I knew it would require pulling that big trim board down along with a bunch of siding and moving it all around. And they would have to replace the trim boards that got cut. I called our superintendent and left a message, and held my breath all weekend waiting to talk to him about it. I called him Monday and he reassured me that nothing is set in stone. He said he would talk to the siding guys about it. A few days later I came back to the house and was very delighted to see this:

The fix.

Detail of correct trim.
It looks like it took them all morning to fix it. I felt bad making the guys do all that extra work, but at the same time, I felt justified in expecting it to look like the final drawings that we signed off on. As of today, the siding still isn't finished. They had to order more materials because the estimator hadn't ordered enough for the job. It should come in by the end of this week. But here is the current look of the house, including our beautiful red shake shingles and all of the brackets mounted!