Vintage Life: To Side or Not to Side

When we purchased our 1920s bungalow, we knew we had a ton of work to do:  demolition, moving walls, rewiring, replumbing, et cetera.  However, the original wood lap siding looked like it was in pretty good shape.

We knew we had areas that would need some repair and patching.

And of course the whole house would have to be scraped and repainted, especially because of the ivy jungle on one side.  This is a reason NOT to let ivy grow on your house.

However, once we had finished all of the demolition and pulled down the walls inside the house, we realized that pretty much all of the siding was in very poor shape.  It would be more labor intensive to patch it than to just pull it all down and start again.  That seems to be a common answer to unexpected problems in our renovation process.

We decided to go with HardiPlank lap siding rather than regular wood siding as it doesn't rot, doesn't burn, and supposedly paint adheres to it very well, reducing the required maintenance.  Although you can order it already painted, we didn't really care for any of the stock colors.  So here is our giant pile of HardiPlank siding in yellow primer waiting for us to get started - in the next blog post.