Clapboard Siding

Oh happy day! We have one little section of our house sided with clapboard!

Neal and Eli worked hard all fall to get the siding up on this section of our house.

We are using cedar siding intermixed with pieces of the original clapboard siding that we have been trying to salvage as we go. Sadly the original clapboard is so old and brittle that most of it breaks as we remove it from the house so we only get a good piece here and there.

I filled the holes in the original clapboard (the blue pieces) with wood filler and then sanded them. Once I had it all painted with Glidden's paint color "White on White" you could not tell the difference between the two types.

The above picture shows why the original clapboard is in such bad shape. Unfortunately it was covered not only with one layer of fiber cement board but then aluminum on top of that trapping inside years of water damage that lead to moisture build up and rot. Oh how I wish that the previous owners had just left it wood siding. The worst thing you can do to an old house is put layer upon layer of materials because you will inevitably cause moisture build up. On top of it you can't see what areas are being damaged or rotting. Both the inside of our farmhouse and the exterior had that done to them. You can see the new wood that we put up on the right side of the above picture. The day that we have all of the aluminum and cement board siding off of the house will be the greatest day in my book.

This little side porch is all we can afford to do for now though. I promise to show this side of the house in it's entirety at some point but right now it is a work in progress. This is not our front door but it is the way most people come in because it is where our driveway comes up to.  This whole area was a rotting screen porch that we tore off. I will show before and afters someday and you won't believe the difference.

Just like everywhere else we have renovated so far we tried to save every penny possible. The door was free from a family friend. I  painted it "Porch Gray" by Better Homes and Gardens. To me it is the perfect door color because it goes with everything. Right now it looks great with the pumpkins but come Christmas it will go nicely with green and red and then come spring it compliments all of our purple bushes and flowers.

The window was $20 at a garage sale and matches with the rest of the double hung windows we have put in. And the light (from Walmart)  is just like the one in our bathroom but only made for exteriors and comes on at dusk and goes off at dawn. Isn't that genius! No more coming home to a dark house!

I was so excited to have a cute porch to put pumpkins on this year. As I explained the exterior of our house is in rough shape and I always felt like any seasonal decorating I did out here was like putting lipstick on a pig. But now at least I have this one little area that I can make cute.

Sadly when it came time to do the trim work out here we had nothing to go on because almost all of the original trim has been removed from our house. And when I went to research what measurement pre-1900 farmhouse trim would have been I found almost nothing. I wanted it to look substantial but not too bulky so we went with five inch casings around the windows and door. Then Neal added a drip edge to the tops of the trim to give it that authentic old house feel.

We don't have railings up yet but definitely by next summer because our little Millie will be learning to walk by then!