Since the last post, a real milestone has been reached. The studio is "in the dry"! Actually, it probably is not 'officially' in the dry since the siding has not been completed on the back wall, but for my purposes, no more rain is coming into the interior of the building.
Just after the last post, Clay Heslep came over and roughed in the electricity. Clay and I went to high school together (actually we are kinfolk somewhere down the line), and April and Clay went to the same college for a while. He is just a great guy and we actually had to twist his arm to get him to let us at least do some family pictures for him as payment for his time and expertise. He was just going to do it all for free...and I have hardly seen him since high school! Now, that's a good friend to have.
That's Clay hard at work.
Pulling wire through the studs (I did some of the mindless work)
The progress that is the most visible and probably the most gratifying since our last update has to be the siding being completed on three sides of the building. It really gives the studio a bonafide look, just like a cottage style house. I decided to use fiber cement siding (also called Hardie Board), in 7" lap siding widths. This Hardie Board is pretty amazing stuff. It really is not a terribly new product, but it has gained a ton of popularity in the last decade or so. It is made up of fiberglass reinforced cement...so, no rotting, no swelling, no burning, no bug damage. Plus, the stuff holds paint better than pretty much any other material out there. I guess the only downside is that it is pretty heavy since it comes in 12' long pieces. I'm here to tell you, though, it's not near as heavy in these 12'x8" boards as it is in 4'x8' sheets like we used on Buster's studio. Now there was a backbreaking bunch of lifting!
So the process of hanging the siding went as such:
First, I trimmed out all the windows and the corners of the building. Most people would recommend using cedar 1x6's, or you can actually buy trim made from fiber cement material, and in a pinch, you could use 1x6's made from pine and paint all sides of the trim before installing it to keep it from rotting. But, since cedar and Hardie Board are ridiculously expensive, and pine 1x6's aren't just a whole lot better, I decided to go with regular ol' pine 2x6's. It's kind of funny that 2x6's are half as expensive as 1x6's but it's true. I just picked out the straightest 2x6's I could find and used them to trim all the windows. It actually turned out pretty cool looking since it sticks out further from the face of the siding, giving the windows a real substantial look. With a little putty to fill the knots and nail holes, they will look pretty nice once they are painted. (For now they are only primed).
You can see my 2x6 cheapo trim here and how the siding was cut and nailed around.
After the trim was completed, a row of z-flashing was nailed at the bottom of the walls. This little piece of bent aluminum served two purposes. One, to keep any water from splashing from the ground back up behind the siding, and two, to provide a "kick-out" for the first row of siding. You see, all the other rows of siding will overlap the one below it, making it lay with the bottom further from the wall than the top. The first row, however, has no other row to sit on top of, so we needed something that would make the angle of the lowest row look the same as the rest of the rows.
Next, chalklines were popped that represented level lines for the courses of siding to line up on, and vertical chalklines were popped to show the locations of the studs behind the tarpaper and plywood. This really made the nailing process a ton faster.
Then, the siding could actually be hung. Sometimes April could help hold one end while I nailed the other, but when she was unavailable, I made a loop out of the plastic straps that held all the siding together on the truck, and nailed it to the wall so that one end of the board could hang in the loop and I could hold the other end and nail it home. It was an ingenious system that I must admit I stole off the internet. (www.finehomebuilding.com is frikkin' awesome). James Hardie told me to leave a 1/8" gap between the ends of the boards where they butted against each other and the trim and fill the gap with caulk to allow for expansion and contraction, and to make the system watertight. I used a putty knife to scrape the extra caulk out of the joints which mimicked the wood grain and made the joints really blend in. Another great thing about this siding is that even though it is made out of concrete, it is pretty easy to cut. All you have to do is score it on both sides with a utility knife run down the side of a speed square, and break it. It breaks right on the line every time. The only tough thing was notching out around windows, but even that really wasn't all that bad.
Here is the east wall half completed.
Here you can see the finished side.
Now that is some real progress!
I just worked from bottom to top until the walls were all sided. Took a while, but really not too difficult.
Now, we have all the electricity roughed in, the a/c and heat is in, most of the insulation is complete, all the doors and windows are in, the front porch has been started, and someone has turned on the light at the end of the tunnel.
What a dork!
Just right
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