The Siding Project From Hell

Ok, I figured someone out there needs to finally put all of this down. I searched high and low for information on removing old nasty InsulBrick siding and restoring the wood. Not much out there, but lots of folks have done it. I think no one wants to post much on the experience as it might scare others away, and we don’t want to suffer alone. From here on InsulBrick will be called GhettoWrap. If you are wondering why I would call it that, take a drive to a less pricey neighborhood and you will understand. Especially here in Milwaukee, actually here in Milwaukee the stuff is everywhere. Uglying up every old neighborhood. I have to say the sales guys back then knew what they were doing, as the managed to sucker lots of folks into the stuff. Now we have other products not worth buying that will be uglying things up 50 years from now.

Till then, I have my own problems with GhettoWrap

Here are a few handy links to start

Wikipedia
A good read
Old House Journal article on replacement Siding
These Folks Have it right 8^)

I will add more later, I think I have a boatload of bookmarks at home.
So, Memorial Day 2005 was a big weekend. I rented a big dumpster!

It was a long, warm day. But fortunately, lots of folks turned up to help out. Also, not being completely crazy we chose to only strip down two sides of the house. Anymore would have been a disaster, starting with not enough dumpster and ending with me going completely insane. There are a few things folks should understand before starting a project like this.

1. Do not take a project like this on if you are currently engaged in a pissing match with the local building inspector!!!!
2. Call ahead, let the inspector know whats going on and what your timelines are
3. Make darn sure that your building inspector understands that *workman like manner* when talking about paint also means that the surface to be painted is ready for paint. Ghetto wrap is not as bad as more modern sidings at trapping humidity. But its still back there, and you cannot hope to paint till the humidity of the wood is down around 12% Much higher than that and you will be painting again next year after all of this paint job falls off.

Unfortunately for me I knew non of the above ( except for the painting part ) So, at the time I was engaged in a pissing match over the condition of the service walk. Yea, there were cracks in it, and some parts were missing. Where was the city 20 years ago when the walk was being poured 1/4 of an inch thick? So, a few weeks into the project I get a letter from the neighborhood services folks telling me I will be fined if I do not immediately replace the missing trim and siding, and paint everything in a workman like manner. I ended up in wasting a day or three in court thanks to their high quality understanding of what was going on. This caused some of the work to be rushed, and caused me to burn extra money hiring in extra help, that was close to worthless. That is the help was. Wow, they were worthless. More on that later. Finally in the end I managed to get out of trouble with the city. Though I highly doubt I made many friends down at city hall, with all of the calling my Alderman, and using less than choice words to describe the stupidity of slapping paint up on an poorly prepped surface just to comply with a stupid request from bureaucrats that didn’t know what they were asking.

Enough of that,
So, we got the ghettowrap off the house. I was lucky. The siding was in pretty good shape, it needed to dry out, the remains of the last paint job needed to be scraped off the thousands of nail holes had to be filled, more sanding priming and more sanding painting and caulk and more paint… I had though that with some focus I could get through it in a few weeks.. Wow, wrong wrong wrong!! It took the entire summer and then some.. In fact there is still some trim to paint, and the emergency cover up boards need to be taken back down to make room for ceder shingles.

The installers did a pretty good hack job.

Trim was more or less all missing, this had been a nice Federal Style, with nice big chunky trim. I was lucky, the same builder used pretty much the same plans to do all of the houses on the block at the same time. So, I had examples of what was missing and how too replace it. I was also lucky that the siding was a common profile that was still be made today… It was just expensive. 8^( So I had to replace most of the window trim, all of the corners, a bunch of the siding itself, the drip edge and a wide border between the first and second floor ( I have no idea what that’s called ) I got to work quickly on replacing the missing wood, the drip edge was in a word easy, the wide border, was not so much but the time I got to the corners and windows I was moving at a pretty good pace, then I hit the roof over the bumpout for the dining room window seat. The thing had been leaking since probably before I was born. The problem was it was a flat roof, they had simply used sheet metal to roof it back when it was new. That eventually failed and then the previous owners ( PO’s) kept going up their and nailing more stuff on top of the leak with out actually fixing it. Now it was my turn and I was not going to fail. Instead I pissed away 3 days, pulling off the garbage, re decking it, flashing it and installing a proper rubber roof in one piece. It no longer rains in the dining room. 8^)

I learned a lot of things last summer. I learned that I do not like to do siding, its like doing a lot of trim work, and I don’t like doing trim.. I learned that even back in the good old days, cutting corners was not unusual. I learned that manually painting a house can be a very large job and that’s why the contractors charge so much for it. I learned that there were a lot of tools that I did not have but really really needed. I learned that hiring the local drunks to do mindless labor is not always cost effective, no matter how cheep they work.

More later, I get tired just thinking about this project…

In the end it was worth it, the place looks a heck of a lot better, I learned a lot of useful skills, and met most of my neighbors. The odds and ends will be done this summer. Then probably the same time that the other two sides come off, I will be hiring out to have the front porch replaced by one that looks like it should be there. That and the current front porch is in pretty sad shape, but those square columns on the bottom are not original, neither is the brickwork, I have most of the original balusters for the handrails up in the attic, they need serious cleaning up, and that is probably a project for next winter, as it will take a load of hours to get them cleaned and patched up again. Though, I am tempted to send them out for a paint stripper bath, that would make life easier.