More Tongue Less Face

The sun came out today, which means I get to go out and start painting again. I just feel every so lucky for this. I can’t tell you how overjoyed I am at the fact that I get to scrape more paint. I’m just the luckiest man in the world. Yes, life just can’t get any better. Before I could paint though, I had to deal with the rot and siding issues with the little bump-out part of Section 5b. Here it is n the picture below.



All of those short little runs of siding needed to be replaced because water had drained in to the wall from the gutter above and rotted everything from the inside out. The good news is, I seemed to have fixed the problem. We had rain the past few days and the wall inside was dry as a bone and there was no more debris. Four years ago when I opened the wall there was about 2-feet of debris stacked up in the wall cavity.

Because we’ve had nasty weather on and off for the past week I did some preliminary work to prepare for the siding replacement. I went out to the wood shed and cut 16 pieces of salvaged siding in to 12-inch lengths. I then scraped all the paint off them and puttied all the holes. I then sanded a second time to clean up the putty, all the while feeling very smart and proud of myself for accomplishing this little task.

But I forgot something.

The siding in the wood shed is a mix of 1895 siding and 1920s siding. To the naked eye they look identical. But they’re not identical and they can’t be used together on the same wall. Go back up and look at the picture. Notice how the little short pieces on the left match up perfectly with the longer pieces on the right. Now imagine that you have a type of siding that looks identical to that, but the face (the part you see) is a ¼ in taller. After every 4 runs you would gain an inch, and those rows would quickly stop matching up. This is what I forgot about the different siding.



In the picture above, the 1895 siding is on the left and the 1920s siding is on the right. The overall height of the boards is the same. Now look at the tongue at the bottom. The 1895 siding has a longer tongue at the bottom and a deeper notch at the top. The longer tongue and deeper notch means less face. When I preped my 16 pieces of siding I used 4, 1895 pieces and TWELVE 1920s PIECES. Grrrrr! It was almost a complete waste of time.

So after I got all the old siding off, and did a little prep in side the wall, I started putting on my beautifully preped pieces of siding and after 3 rows they stopped matching the other rows on the house. So it was back to the wood shed for me. I now feel like a professional wood siding tongue inspector. I can spot that 1895 shit a mile away.