So today went better than yesterday. Sleep helped, unsurprisingly. This morning I tracked down some more of the stainless steel finishing nails that hold our cedar strips onto the house – despite our local Bob saying they had them in stock, they couldn’t find them, so I trekked over to Lacey and grabbed some more. It’s a bit more of a schlep, but it allowed me to get back to the cedar application.
I also had to plane down some more of the strips. I’m trying to be as frugal as possible, because we are probably not going to have enough to make it around the house. But we might. The calculations we did were based on a vast overage, but also on 2″ wide strips – forgetting that 1″x2″ is really about 2/3″ x 1.5″. So while we thought we had 40% overage before we started, we realised very early on that we had made a fairly massive maths error, and then re-ran the numbers and came to the conclusion that we may, or may not, have exactly enough. I think we have about 1% overage. Which is not really appropriate given the quality of the lumber we’re using. But it’s what we’ve got.
So I’ve tried to make sure I’m using as much of every board as I can; even gluing some strips back together where they’d split, and gluing knots in to boards where they’ve worked loose but are still intact.
Anyhow, I cut probably fewer of the short strips that go either side of the porch than we need to reach the top, but enough that we should get close (allowing me to work out exactly how many we need when we’re closer) – and continued working up either side of the door.
They’re actually not quite in line on either side I realised, so I’m trying to correct for that as we go up because at the top of the door the two sides have to meet up again.
Still, I really love the look of the cedar, and am quite looking forward to the interesting little momentary glimpses of the street you’ll get as you come out of the house.
When Kathryn arrived we set to – and finished – the first coat of the white/grey paint on the trim boards and eaves. The weather started to look suspicious for rain (despite Dark Sky’s promise that it wouldn’t (and it didn’t)) so we traded for drywalling. The first of the sheets in the second bedroom went up much better than either of the last two we’ve done. It still took us at least 90 minutes, but it was a fairly organised 90 minutes and all of it went fairly smoothly (assuming it’s still attached when we get there tomorrow).
So then there’s just one and the diddy bit up at the ridge more for us to do in there, and then it’s on to the lounge. At least until we rent a drywall lift that can actually reach the top of the ceiling.