Baby Steps

We've finally made enough of the necessary decisions to get started on the project.  We decided to begin with the garage to keep the project manageable as we continue to learn how to do this job properly.  For example, we are imagining laying out all of the siding in our basement while we apply the finish, but the house has more square footage of siding than of basement.

To make up for the material that will be lost in deconstruction, we've decided to add French doors to the south side of the garage and reside the north side of the garage in a different material.  Since the north side of the garage forms one half of a breezeway going to the backyard, it seems natural to use a different material in this area.  In addition, the boards on the breezeway make up almost a quarter of the house's siding, comparable to the amount we expect to lose in deconstruction, so if things go as planned, we won't run out of boards for the project because of what we save from this area.

Right now, we are considering tongue-and-groove cedar siding, installed vertically, for the breezeway, but we'll look around for some other options. Ideally, we'd like to use reclaimed wood for the vertical siding; brand-new boards wouldn't match the siding on the rest of the house as well. We'd also like to find a salvaged set of French doors and a larger window to replace the one on the west side of the garage. Luckily, the nearby ReBuilding Center and ReStore are good sources for this sort of thing. This SketchUp drawing of the garage shows the vertical siding on the north side and the additional door on the south side. It also shows one possible color scheme: "Asparagus" trim and "Cayenne" doors.

As far as refinishing the siding, we've abandoned the planer idea in favor of sanding down all the boards. The problem with the planer is that the outside surface of the boards is bumpy from where all of the patching material is installed, and in all likelihood, this uneveness will translate to the side we're trying to finish when we run it through the planer.  My experiments show that I can sand the boards using a random orbital sander with 60 and then 150 grit at a pace of about one foot per minute, so to do all of the siding from the whole house, we are looking at 20 hours of sanding; not too bad.