Sunday Snapshot ... Preparing Siding for the Shack

Working on an outdoor renovation project is challenging in winter ... especially when that project requires paint (which cannot be applied outdoors when it's cold).  What's a girl to do when she is facing a stack of a whole wall's worth of siding that needs to be scraped and sanded and primed and painted?

She works indoors where it's warm, of course!  These pieces of siding are ten feet long, five-and-a-half inches wide, and my basement work island can hold five of them at a time.  

For each board, I have to:
1.  Scrape off as much paint as possible, using my trusty Bahco carbide pull scraper.
2.  Fill the nail holes on the bottom edge of the board and sand the board smooth with my orbital sander.
3.  Prime with stain sealing primer.
4.  Apply one coat of good quality exterior paint.

From left to right:  untouched board, scraped, sanded, primed, and painted.

With this process, I can do five boards per day ... allowing time for drying for the primer and the paint.  I haven't worked on this every day, though.  I sand outside, and we've had a couple of rainy days, so I gave myself those days off. 

The pile of finished siding boards is getting taller! 

Soon I hope to have pre-finished a large enough stack of siding, and primed and painted the boards that will be used for corner and window trim, and it shouldn't take long to get the siding put back onto north side of the shack.  Then, when the weather is warmer, I will caulk and apply a final coat of paint.

Before we know it, The Shack will go from looking like this:

This is what it looks like right now.

To something this:

Photoshop mock-up done by my talented husband.  Our son-in-law said that the arched clerestory windows look like the back of a 1963 Corvette.

More updates on The Shack as progress continues.

Happy Sunday, Everyone! 

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Sunday Snapshots are posts that are devoted to a moment in time that represents a slice of life in Hartwood, or wherever else I happen to be.