Saturday, October 24, 2015

Musical Siding

Day One: the boards on all four sides of the window do not fit. The gaps between the siding and the window
trim are just too wide. And vinyl won't stretch that far.

The kitchen window is 70 inches wide. The opening in the siding was 73 inches wide. Oops.

The spiffy new windows in Jennifer’s Dundas home were installed last spring. With November about to follow October, Jenn’s unpaid contractor sighed and strapped on his tool belt .

A suitable product match was found at Menard’s, there are 200 square feet of slate vinyl siding on order and promised. Allow two weeks for delivery. In the meantime, in the spirit of Jenn’s values of reuse, repurpose and recycle, we played a little musical chairs with the longer but poorly-fit siding, which is still in good shape.

Vinyl siding may be an economical product, but a bit quirky to master. Stan viewed some YouTube videos and interviewed a local expert before he started in on his small part of the project. The idea for the installer is to show as few ugly splices as possible. Make a game of it.

The top photo is Day One. The boards on both sides of the kitchen window are too short, though it is hard to tell. So we removed the boards from both sides, then recut the longer boards and swapped them with the short side.

Voila!

Hopefully we’ll get the new 12 footers delivered soon. . . and serious professional help. It’s supposed to be an easy winter in Minnesota this year. . . but we’re not counting on it.

Nice, tight seal under the window and on the right side. So far, so good. Hope we can post the final soon.