Waiting for the Sun

All of the siding has now been removed from the garage. Very few of the boards were broken in deconstruction, although several developed some splitting near the thin edge.  I glued these boards back together with Titebond III wood glue. With these repairs, we expect to be able to reuse 85-90% of the siding. Our original estimate of how much siding we could salvage turned out to be very conservative, which is great news.

The south wall of the garage with all the siding removed.  The southwest corner of the garage had some old (and long-ago-repaired) insect damage, but overall the structure is in great shape.

We have been waiting for the weather to cooperate so that we can get these boards stained and reinstalled.  What we've done so far: the region of unpainted wood on the (formerly front and soon to be) back side of the siding has been primed with Zinsser Allprime, the nail holes have been filled with ZAR Wood Patch, the painted edge of the boards has been cut off, and the (formerly back and soon to be) front side of the siding has been sanded to 120 grit.  The sanding is an enormous job, and I underestimated the time that it would take.  Some of the boards have more prominent mill marks than my test board did, so they require a lot more sanding.  It took about sixteen hours to sand all the boards removed from the garage and I had estimated twenty hours for both the house and the garage, so I underestimated by probably a factor of 3!

The removed siding stacked inside the garage.  All of the boards have been primed, cut, and sanded.  The single dark board in the center has been finished with Cetol Log & Siding stain in Teak.

So there has been some good (salvage percentage is high) and some bad (sanding takes forever), but we applied the finish to a piece of siding and it looks gorgeous.  Currently, we have high hopes that we will end up with a home that is beautiful and unique, and that we will do so with virtually no environmental impact.

Siding board with the Cetol Log & Siding stain applied. You can see an example of a filled nail hole near the bottom of the board.  

Finishes

The folks at Powell Paint Center applied some of the available finishes to one of the boards that was broken during the deconstruction process.  From right to left, the finishes are Cetol Log & Siding in three colors: Teak (085), Cedar (077), and Natural (078), and ArborCoat Transparent Deck & Siding in Cedar (637-40).

The Cetol Natural and the ArborCoat Cedar are too light for this application as the discoloration in the reclaimed wood really stands out, especially with the ArborCoat.  I purposely did a mediocre job of sanding down this board so that we could pick a finish that looked good even if every board isn't sanded to perfection.

Cetol Log & Siding Cedar (left) and Teak (right).

Above is a close-up of the two finishes that look good.  We're leaning toward the Teak finish because the darker and browner finish does an even better job of blending all the tones of the reclaimed wood together.  This is an extreme closeup of the Teak finish under artificial light:

It would be nice to see how these finishes look in bright sunlight, but this being Portland, we may or may not get that opportunity before we need to pull the trigger on one of these.