Catching Up: Siding

Talk about some serious radio silence for a while.

It’s a new year, so that means it’s time to refocus on getting a new series of posts up. Starting with all of the drafts I’ve had stored for weeks and finally get them live.

One of the big ones, and one of the big cosmetic changes we’ve made, was to remove the old, gross, stained, white vinyl siding from the back of the house. It covers all of the former sleeping porches/ addition areas. It was an an ugly, unexciting white, that desperately needed a face lift.

But what made the matter worse was that on the sides of each of the additions, were old windows. Not just working windows, but windows that the previous owners decided to cover from the inside, but keep them outside, resulting in broken windows that were exposing the interior of the house to outside. So we got them framed out correctly and sided over. Something I’m really glad for doing on day as freezing as today.

But, of course, there was a surprise waiting for us. Luckily, Gabe’s mom Nora, was staying with us for a few weeks as we were navigating some of the big renovations/ moving process and helped us hugely!

Once we removed the vinyl siding, we were expecting to find plywood and the structure of the house. Well, not quite. Instead we found an old layer of aluminum siding that dates way back.

The siding was ugly. And rather scary.

But after talking to our contractor on the project, he recommended we actually leave it. –Wait a second, really, leave that old rusty crap? — But yeah, when it comes down to it, it’s not exposed and just serves as an extra layer of insulation and helps to keep the house warmer and quieter. So let it stay indeed.

We had a lot of back and forth with the color of the new siding, but ended on a simple, clean color: sterling gray.

I have to admit, I was a bit nervous looking at this old rusty stuff. But once the new facelift started going into place, I was put at ease. One thing we opted not to do quite yet is the aluminum molding around all of the windows. It’s a fairly big process to redo it and since one of these days we’re going to replace all of the windows anyway, we decided it just wasn’t worth it at this stage. Once the weather warms up again, we’ll do some paint touch ups to finish the job off.

But what a fact lift the new siding makes!