When we got this house almost 3 years ago, we knew it needed work and were prepared to do most of it ourselves. We’ve been working on the interior since before we moved in with Tanner doing some landscaping work here and there. This summer we started tackling the exterior. The paint on our siding was seriously chipping in a very bad way, and it made the whole house look like crap, to say the least.
We spent months trying to figure out what kind of siding to do (and what color, but I’ll save that for later) when Tanner finally decided to just get a quote to see how much it would cost to get the siding installed instead of doing it ourselves. The nice gentleman who came to see us on that buggy day told us that we shouldn’t take down the original wood clapboard siding just to replace it with more wood since ours was in good shape. That made our decision for us. Of course, the guy was trying to sell us HardiePlank siding, not to convince us to keep what we already had, but we weren’t really interested in spending $10,000.
A month or so after deciding to repaint our siding, we decided to start, armed with a heat gun called The Silent Paint Remover and loads of naïveté. After 2 days of scraping, 1 day of priming, and 2 evenings of painting, we had 1 side of the house painted and a couple cases of exhaustion. We had no idea how tough it really was going to be, but we just kept telling ourselves that we’re saving $10,000, and everything was fine. We spent Labor Day weekend on side 2; the deluge of rain put a damper on our plans, but we should finish side 2 sometime next week.
After 1 coat of primer…you’ll have to stay tuned to see the color we picked
Luckily, Tanner’s family has a friend with extensive experience in cutting down trees. His actual response was “oh, that’s just a twig.” So with the help of Tanner’s father and said friend, it was taken down within a couple hours, and the only damage was some scratches and dings in the siding and some torn shingles. We were lucky on all counts.
