Siding – Cedar Shingles on House Can Eliminate Need to Paint
Of all routine home-maintenance jobs, which one do you think takes the most time and effort?
The hands-down winner has to be painting. Painting a house is a hard, messy, even dangerous job. When you factor in all the preparation and cleanup, it can easily take one man a week or two to do a house, and then the whole procedure has to be repeated every few years.
The obvious way out of this rut is to buy a house that doesn’t need painting. But what if you already own a home that does need painting? Well, there are avenues of escape.
You can have the house re-sided with aluminum or vinyl siding. Many siding makers claim that this is cheaper, in the long run, than constant repainting. Whether re-siding makes sense for you depends upon how bad your existing paint and siding are, plus how long you intend to remain in the house. The worse off your house is, and the longer you plan to keep it, the better re-siding can look.
Another approach is to strip all the paint off your house and start over with stain or a clear water-repellent finish instead of paint. Your house will still need recoating now and then, but recoating with stains and repellents is much easier than painting. They are easier to apply, and seldom require much in the way of surface preparation.
Paint, on the other hand, can crack, peel and blister, forcing you into endless rounds of scraping, sanding and spot priming – all of which can take longer than the actual application of the paint.
Stripping a house of all its old paint so it can be stained is a major undertaking. Thw easiest approach is to hire a professional sandblaster. My brother and another friend have both had their shingled house blasted and stained, and both are very pleased with the result.
Speaking of shingles, another alternative is to re-side your home with cedar shingles. These can be left bare or treated with stain or preservative. Once in place, they should provide a lifetime of service with little or no attention.
Shingles are small, light and easy for one man to work with. You can probably put them up yourself, with no help. And in most cases, you can apply them right over the existing siding. This has many benefits; for example:
You don’t have to remove the old siding, and you don’t have to get rid of it.
You can use the old siding as a guide for applying the shingles.
You’ll get a little extra insulating value (about R-0.8) if you leave the old siding in place.
The easiest way to shingle over existing siding is to nail the shingles to the high points of the old siding. If, for example, the siding is wide, say about 8 inches, the nails are driven into every course of the old siding. If your home has narrow siding, you might nail into every other course.
To use this technique, you will have to make the exposure of your shingles (the length of the shingle that is exposed rather than covered by overlapping shingles above it) the same as your old siding, or a multiple of your existing siding exposure.
My house has beveled siding with an exposure of 7 3/4 inches – so I’d install my shingles with that same exposure. If I had narrow siding, with an exposure of, say, 4 3/4 inches, I would install the shingles with an exposure of 9 1/2 inches.
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Tags: cedar shingles, home siding