A billion thin bits of cedar

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So yesterday I made it to the corner of the building. Or more accurately, I finished applying cedar to the front corner of our house – I’d not trimmed it to length, but it was all there:

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Last night, and, for a while, this morning, I was wondering if I’d manage some fair distance down the south side of the building today. But I’d not considered that:

We need 12 of the black painted furring strips for that wall (there’s still the back wall to do, too). So this morning I needed to cut and paint them before I could get started. And to work out that we needed 12 I first had to sit down and work out the pattern.

I’d not worked out how long to make the cedar strips…because they’re 12 foot long and our building is just over 24 foot – plus the inch at each end to make it meet the cedar that’s furred out from the building anyhow. So it ends up being ~24′ 5″. Which you can’t do out of two 12′ strips. At the north end I screwed up and ended up with an erroneous non-brick-pattern line because I did alternating rows of [6′, 12′, the end bit] and [12′, 6′, the end bit]. Which seemed fine in my head, but ends up with:


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Which was stoopid. But it’s behind a fence anyhow, and I seem to recall that what I did was throw in a 3′ section somewhere to make it not line up. I can’t recall how I ‘fixed’ it, but it’s not quite the way we intended.

The south end I spent some time thinking about it this morning before attacking it (and I’d thought about this for some time before) and after some playing I have:


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(3’5″, 12′, 9′; 9′, 12′, 3’5″)

Which looks like it’ll work well. But… of course, in addition to working out how it would fit together if it was a plain flat wall, this is not a plain flat wall (we have none of them). This is one of the most complex ones – with the fuse box and the 3 outlets (one box containing two standard / doubles, one for the 40A Rav and one for the 50A general EV charger outlet).

So having sussed the plan, painted the furring strips I then realised that I needed to plane some more cedar. Because, if you’d forgotten, to save money we got rough cut cedar, not planed, so it has to be planed before going onto the house.

So once I’d planed a bunch of strips today I spent a lot of time measuring and cutting. I trimmed down the front ones to length (although I need to get a DA sander on ends of them). I put in the two stainless steel nails into the ends of each one that tie them to the straight runs to the back. And this is where we’re at:

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It was pretty hot out there so I hid under the shade of our shade, which worked fine earlier in the day, but as the sun got low in the evening I just couldn’t find a way to hide and ended up getting pretty warm… but I’m reasonably pleased with how it’s working out. I’m somewhat nervous about the meeting up at the back of the two sides. Thankfully, the french door is in the way, so if it’s not perfectly in line it’s not a total disaster, but it’d be really nice if it was close without a lot of frantic adjustment.

Plan is (as always, subject to change) – do the south side, then do the north side, then do the back.

There’s still the whole strip around the front door too, but that really needs the new front door to be in. Which we’re not quite ready for yet.

Feh.

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.