First outer wall up!

After the garage was mostly framed out, we started on the siding. The first step was to completely wrap the garage with a layer of house wrap. One big mo-fo roll of the house wrap was about $200. You saved $50 if you used the store brand instead of the brand name without a big ol’ logo on the wrap. So we sold out and decided to become corporate whores with the garage wrap ad to save the dollars. You win if you can figure out which big box store we bought the house wrap from, it is very subtle...

Wrapping the whole garage was pretty easy and fun. I unrolled the wrap and pulled it tight while Pete hammered in the nails. You have to pay attention to make sure the wrap stays level and covers all the exposed wood. Other than that, it was nice and easy because while the giant nine foot roll is a little awkward to handle, it isn’t heavy. We wrapped the long western side wall, and tucked the roll back into the garage for the time being. The heavy duty stapler helped get the wrap on the garage nice and tight.

Then, almost excited at the thought putting up our first piece of siding, we grabbed the nine foot section of cement fiber siding and tried to get it up on the wall.

Fail.

There was no way one of us could hold the board in place while the other shot nails in it. The boards are heavy, I’d put them at this-is-really-heavy-and-awkward-to-carry weight range and are extremely hard to handle (impossible) by yourself. We just couldn’t hold the board up flat against the wall and get it secured at the same time.

Quickly using those lumps that are three feet above our asses (bonus points if you know the movie ) we turned our plethora of scrap wood into a handy shelf to put the siding on top of. It was a little difficult to level the whole thing and then find a way to secure the shelf because, there was nada to nail it into on the side. The siding needed to cover all the wood which left us with only the cement blocks exposed. As a solution for that We whipped up corner braces and stakes to hammer into the ground for support. About an hour and a half after our original attempt, we try once again to get the siding up.

Success!

The ledge worked fantastically and we were able to get the first panel up and secured with little trouble. That is, if you don’t count the major muscle strain that it took to lift that unwieldy and heavy panel a foot or two into the air. You should see how much Aleve I am taking lately. I had to (temporarily) stop drinking beer because I’m afraid of causing liver damage. Or is that just with Tylenol and I can crack open a cold one after work again?

Second panel did not go up as smoothly as the first. We got the panel up and realize it is crooked. Damn it. Then, I absentmindedly softly kicked it into place- Bad idea! I cracked the bottom and it crumbled off. Whoops. To fix the lopsided bit we grabbed some shims and straightened out the panel using them. Since the west wall of the garage doesn’t have any windows, it is one super long stretch of putting up the full sheets of paneling. This needed to get up not looking like we did it while on a bender.

We worked and worked and worked...

Dealing with some challenges along the way required head scratching until we figured out a solution. Such as one really twisted framing board that fell right where the seam between two panels was supposed to be. A few quick cuts of an extra 2x4 and we had that board sistered right up. There was shimming going on left and right. Sweating, since this was on the sunny side of the building in the afternoon and lots of “I’m gonna drop it!” shouts but after a few hours of super hard work- we had our wall up!

:)