Ryan is working on the siding this week.  2 problems with this, our painters/construction crew took a couple weeks off and decided this week to start back up full time so they are kind of stepping on each others’ toes and annoying Ryan in general with the quality of work.  I’ll wait until they are completely finished before I do a post on all of that, so far they have fixed the couple of things that were really bad but in general, having a single carpenter trying to put up long lengths of boards or moldings is not easy and they did not staff this job correctly.  Ryan and I could easily have done everything they plan to do in just a single week with just the 2 of us.  They finally seem to have a second carpenter here (although they do not work together) and Ryan has been helping them here and there so things get done correctly (one guy wanted to use 2 pieces for an 8′ length just because it would be too hard with one person so ryan helped so we wouldn’t have that break).

All well, we’ll see how it comes out.  Anyway so on Monday Ryan got up some frieze boards and got the siding started.  Problem was that the first side to do was full 16′ lengths of siding and doing that with one person is very hard so after a few hours we decided that I would take 2 hours off on Wednesday morning to help him finish up the long lengths and he could focus on the smaller stuff.

Tuesday he removed the rest of the siding on the left side of the window we still need to replace and got the front porch section cleaned up that we are siding up to (aluminum siding still to remove and some trim).  Then he almost fell of the roof after slipping on some debris the contractors were leaving all over the place so he quit for the day and took a break.

Wednesday was a much better day, I started by sweeping up the roofs.  Then we got the long sections of siding done with the two of us.  Ryan spent a good deal of time helping the carpenters with their jobs and trying to make things easier for them because angles and moldings are definitely not their specialty!   He then got the section of 12′ pieces of siding up on the far right.

I’m pretty hopeful that we can get the siding finished up by this weekend.  Ryan also has next monday and tuesday off if he needs them but i think he wants to do some other stuff by then.  Oh and this weekend we have our neighbor’s daughter coming over for a couple hours to play with Alex which frees me up to help finish up the siding too.

Wednesday afternoon progress – the carpenters are done for the day (they are waiting for some moldings to arrive) and Ryan is still siding that far side.

a closer look at the siding done so far

Rather than strip the siding on the porch the painter asked if he could replace the siding with new – we agreed and even paid for the siding (they are losing a lot of money on this job with how much work is going into it since he did not estimate enough time for stripping everything).

Ryan was able to get the far side almost up to the top of the window before calling it quits yesterday.  Today he is working around the carpenters again (they are doing the moldings right above him) but he’s gotten the 2 smaller sections about halfway up and the last 2 12′ pieces done (the last piece has to wait for window caps).  He thinks he can finish up that side minus the caps/last pieces of siding this afternoon before he has to pick up Alex.

Tomorrow will be the window on the left and siding over there.