Siding

Here's the finished siding and it looks beautiful. I used HardiePlank lap siding with a bit of a wood grain design. Hardie makes a fabulous product for siding. On my main house, I have the old asbestos shingles. I found the Hardie manufactures replacement shingles in their Hardieboard material as an exact match so that homeowners can just replace a few without having to reside the entire house.

If you look under the threshold of the front door, you can see where one of the handymen and I propped up the door with scrap wood. Willie said that he'd come back to make a brick threshold support. He never did so we set a length of 4 x 4 treated post lumber underneath. I'll have to replace that eventually but it should hold fine for a few years at least.

Below is a shot of the back with the siding completed and the back shed door installed. I bought that door for $5 from Habitat and had it cut to fit the shorter frame. Unfortunately, the cut was not sealed properly so it's been damaged by the rain. Have to fix that!

Windows

In order for the siding to begin, all of the windows had to be installed. That was a long wait. It was a wait for the windows I ordered to finally arrive and a wait for someone to install them and to coordinate the two. But it finally happened. Well, what finally happened was that I had someone installing the last of the windows and discovered that the small awning windows were still not the ones I'd ordered. So, Home Depot sent someone over to piece together what I'd originally ordered from the different, incorrect sets the manufacturer had sent. That worked out fine and we all had a good laugh. I could laugh about it because I knew now that Home Depot was graciously eating the cost of those windows.

So, here you see some of the siding work with all of the windows installed. I guess that I should mention that I went with your basic single-pane vinyl windows. Except for the transoms. And I think the door windows are double pane. Aside from the bare bones budget, my reasoning was that even the single frame windows are far superior to the old windows in my main house. I think they work and look just fine for the needs of the building.

Hmmm... and now I can see that the siding guys did not wrap that bit above the door at the back of the shed. They started out all right but became surly and negligent by the end. And charged me more than stated at outset. And left their huge rattle-trap truck with the confederate flags in my driveway throughout. But they did a pretty good job. One of my handymen helped to correct the bits they left for me to fix. They came, they did their thing, they left. A friend of mine (not a native Tennessean) told me, "Tennessee is the 'good enough' state. People here work till it's good enough."