Siding — Closing in the Last Few Faces
The installation crew is close to wrapping up the Boral TruExterior lap siding that clads most of the house.
Bruce and I started installing siding in August on the top of the gable ends before lifting the walls.
Bruce has taken the lead in organizing the siding around the house. Two students from WACTC — Adam and Brandon — have worked with him nearly every day for more than six weeks, with additional help from Cameron and Mr. Haynes.
Most of the house is clad with Boral TruExterior lap siding, a 1/2-in. by 6-in. bevel lap siding (aka clapboard). The siding looks great once installed but is a challenge to handle. The thin bevel profile makes the fly-ash-based siding floppy. It takes two workers to handle lengths longer than 10 ft. (the manufactured length is 16 ft.). The only way we’ve found that one person can move the siding alone is to clamp pieces to a length of 1×3 furring. When moving full-length 16-ft. pieces around, we gang three or four pieces of lap siding together with the furring and space four to six spring clamps out evenly.
The siding can be face-nailed or blind-nailed. We’ve mostly been blind-nailing and only face-nail in tight spots and when there are gaps along the bottom edge. There’s minimal expansion and contraction. Some of the joints that we butt tight together in August at 90 degrees opened up 1/16 in. or a little more now that temps are below freezing in the mornings.
Over the next week, Adam and Bruce will likely wrap up siding the garage and move on to applying the ceiling boards beneath the deck.
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