WNY Handyman

How to install wood siding.

Installation of wood siding is foreign to most.  With today’s building materials, traditional wood lap siding has gone by the wayside.   The cost of lumber has skyrocketed in recent years. Because of that, vinyl became an easy alternative.  Who can argue with the low maintenance. of a vinyl siding?

The need for wood siding will come into place if you have a traditional lap siding home and are putting on an addition, adding a window or door, or replacing rotting boards.  The following are a few quick tips when installing your wood lap siding.

Get your caulk out.  Unlike vinyl siding, wood siding will need a bit more attention paid to the weatherproofing.  Wood siding will move a lot depending on the weather.  Anything you can do to keep water away from wood will be well worth the effort.

• Wood siding at a window.  I am going to assume (as many of the DIY shows do) that you have an easy transition here. Let’s look at a traditional window with a trim piece that is 5/4 lumber (true 1″ thickness).  In this case, we are going to simply butt our wood siding up to the window trim.  Be liberal with your caulk.  If this is a patch job and you didn’t have the opportunity to weatherproof the window, be sure to lay a nice bead of caulk down where the window trim meets your sheathing.  Your wood siding can set down into that wet bead of caulk. This will seal up the trim, and the end of your siding piece.  Again, keep water out!  You don’t always need to but the siding right against the window trim. A 1/8″ gap is acceptable as long as that gap is made water tight with caulk.
• Minimize the number of joints in your siding.  A joint is an area where water can/will penetrate.  Spend a couple extra bucks to have 16′ boards delivered rather than tossing 8 footers in your SUV.  The clean, joint free, run is also more pleasing to the eye.  If you do have a joint, be sure to stagger it.  What I mean by that is that you should not have the joint from one row in close proximity to a joint from the row above or below.  You will just give water a place to penetrate with ease.  When you do have joints, I like to seal the end with a product suck as a water repellent, or even a caulk.
• Inside Corners: When doing an inside corner, the method that should be used is to install a corner piece that the siding can butt up against. Don’t attempt to do an inside miter.  It won’t work out. Period.  Use a square piece of 5/4 in your corner and but each run of siding up to that.
• Siding Outside corners (see the picture for details. Click picture for larger view):  We decided to write this article due to the poor job done on an outside corner by someone working for us. Don’t ever just nail up your siding (without a miter or a corner board)!  This looks horrible, is not water tight, will be a home for insects (bees) and will deteriorate quickly.  When doing a corner, you can miter the joint. An outside corner miter needs to be precise and has a specific nailing pattern.  It isn’t my favorite corner joint treatment, but it can provide a pretty amazing look if done very well.  The typical method is to attach corner boards and then create butt joint as was done at window trim, or an inside corner.  Your corner trim boards need to go up prior to your siding.  I have seen some lay down the siding and then cover the corner with a trim board, filling the large gaps with caulk. Not a good method.
  

  Install wood siding outside corner options

• One other thing to keep in mind is the nailing of your siding. When you lap each course, the nail from one row should fall just above the upper piece of the siding below. Take a look at the graphic for more. You should only be nailing through one course of the siding. This will allow for some natural movement rather than binding the siding down which can cause unwanted results such as cracking, binding, loosening of fasteners, etc.
  

  Nailing of lap siding

Hope this helped with your lap siding job.

Wood siding how-to — Part B — Corner Details.

I did a quick renovation of our laundry room last year and have been surprised to find how many people have asked questions about it when it came time to do their own. We live in a neighborhood of new’ish homes where many share a similar layout for the laundry room and pantry. The general layout is a long narrow room.

With the shift toward stackable, front-load, appliances, many find themselves with some added space in the small laundry and are seeking a way to make good use of the room. When I did my laundry room renovation I was looking to maximize storage and include some cabinetry. You can read the earlier post to see more. ‘

The primary purpose of this post is to share my Google Sketchup File for our laundry room layout. You will see that cabinetry is included (Ikea) and the washer and dryer units are from GE.

Good luck with your own laundry room renovation:

Well, our Trafficmaster Allure floor installation is complete.  If you aren’t familiar with this plank vinyl flooring product you can find it at Home Depot.  The product is a fantastic alternative to a peel and stick vinyl tile.  At the end of the installation, the product acts as a sheet vinyl would rather than free floating pieces that will gap and slide over time. Any movement should be covered by your final molding piece.

We wrote our initial review of the product here: http://www.wnyhandyman.com/trafficmaster-allure-plank-vinyl-floor-review/

There are a number of videos regarding the installation of the TrafficMaster Allure product. Here are a couple that we found useful prior to installation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILuez7u7Mvw (part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khXeJ0E8-Do (part 2)

Installation of Allure Trafficmaster Plank Vinyl from HomeDepot.com (PDF file)
http://www.homedepot.com/catalog/pdfImages/72/72845250-3948-4c77-824f-50f17da70f63.pdf

Summary of Allure Trafficmaster Plank Vinyl review:

Pros:

1. Price
   At less than $2 per square foot, this is a good value for the money.  In fact, you can run over to Ebay and pick up a Home Depot or Lowe’s coupon to save an extra 10%!
2. Ease of install
   No special tools are needed. Similar install to a peel and stick tile without the slippage and separation. Cuts with a razor knife and detailed cuts can be made with shears. Since this is a floating installation, you don’t adhere to the sub floor making it a much cleaner DIY floor.
3. Durability
   The product has a thickness to it that won’t allow it to show many imperfections through.  With many vinyl flooring products every crack and void in your subfloor will show through. The vinyl planks are about 2x the thickness of an inexpensive sheet vinyl product. This will help with durability and smoothness of surface

Cons:

1. Errors aren’t simple to correct
   If you make a mistake when applying this product, you are not going to be able to pull a single piece out with ease. The adhesion achieved when placing the pieces is nearly impossible to undue. If you make a mistake, you might have to backtrack quite a bit.
2. Instructions don’t fully cover the detailed steps
   As with other laminate installations undercuts should be made at door jambs and molding should cover your outer gap for the best result.  This isn’t covered in the basic instructions that come with the product.  To achieve a professional looking result, this should be done.  If you don’t have one, consider a Factory-Reconditioned Dremel Multi-Max.

I would absolutely use this product again or recommend it to any DIY’er.  Easy and a solid looking end result.

If you have done drywall work you probably understand how difficult certain areas are to reach.  Without a drywall lift (Red Line Professional 11-Foot Drywall Lift Panel Hoist Jack) the job can be difficult and dangerous.

I had a ceiling job to do so that we can move forward with other projects in this room and we didn’t want to wait on the pros to do this section. I decided to fashion a lift to make the job safe and easy.  The lift that I built was pretty straightforward and turned out to do a little more than I expected.  At first this was going to be a 2 person job. When my co-worker didn’t arrive, I decided to give the 14′ ceiling a go on my own.  Just prior to doing so, I taped my phone to a nearby ladder and turned the video on. I figured that this was going to go well, or terribly bad.  Either way, I wanted to be sure that I captured it.

I modeled the lift using Google Sketchup. Sketchup is a terrific (and free) 3d design program. It is remarkably easy to use if you have any CAD experience.  Here is a link to my Sketchup file.
DIY Drywall Lift

The material used was nothing more than 7 2×4′s and 3 hinges. I screwed the 2x’s together with 3″ drywall screws and fastened the hinges to a cleat that I then screwed to the wall (the cleat is the 7th 2×4 if you were wondering). By screwing the hinges to the cleat while on the ground it allowed me to position the entire lift at the correct height. I was then able to screw the cleat off at a few points without having to hold the whole rig up.

DIY Drywall Lift Plans

Once the piece closest to the wall was fastened to the ceiling (lift up to the 2×4 @ 48″ and swing up), I was then able to place the next piece a cleat at the base of the lift and lift/fasten. I was nervous about doing this solo since I hadn’t tested the strength of my setup. The sheets of drywall were 95 pounds each so a crash wouldn’t be without some damage below (me).

Video to follow.

A $3 tube of adhesive caulk along with a few screws and a little elbow grease was all that was needed to repair my garage door support bracket.

Wayne Dalton garage door bracket

I have a Wayne Dalton garage door and the bracket ripped from the door yesterday morning.  Kind of surprising since the door bracket was hanging from a single screw.  I thought that I was going to be in for a hard to find part and a difficult repair.

Here is a view of the bracket. You can’t necessarily tell, but the bracket (also known as an Operator Reinforcement Bracket) has a crack just below the black bracket piece.  It was bending and that point and probably would have cracked completely with one more operation of the garage door.

I haven’t ever experienced this issue, so I did a bit of research. Immediately, I was able to come up with a replacement bracket for Wayne Dalton door for about $20.  However, that was mail order and I needed my garage door today. I figured I would give Lowe’s a shot to see if they carried a universal bracket.  They did not, however, the gentleman in the building materials department had an idea.

Flip it upside down and reattach!

Funny, but the simplest solution often passes us by when we are in the midst of a project or repair.  He was right. The only part of the bracket that saw any strain, was where the bracket attached to the garage door motor arm.  I simply created a paper template and copied the screw hole pattern on the opposite end. It was a mirror image.

To attach the bracket, I used the existing screws (4) plus the screws where the black arm bracket attaches.  The original installation utilized 2 beads of adhesive to attach. I went a bit overboard in this department and used adhesive wherever  I had surface contact. In addition to that I added screws wherever possible (why not over do it here?). After all, this door only has a 1/16″ aluminum skin along with a lightweight foam core.  There isn’t much holding power for a fastener.

Flip and Re-attach Garage Door Bracket

$3 later (I had the 1/2″ screws laying around the shop) and I have a secure door bracket once again.  Simple solution.

When I am browsing real estate online it gets a little frustrating when the pictures are nothing but a dark room with some shapes that I can make out. We have all seen them and it usually happens when you are taking the picture while pointing at a window. I am not a photographer, so I can’t tell you how to avoid that, but I can tell you how to fix the image before you post it online.

Realtors often post pictures where nothing is clear. I would argue that they would be better off by not posting the photo rather than posting the dark depressing looking version.

Realtors, listen up… There is a simple fix and it is free. Just about any photo management and/or editing program has these simple fixes in the program. I use a free product from Google named Picasa. You simply import the picture into Picasa and double click the thumbnail of the photo. This will open up a window with a menu on the left where the first tab is “Basic Fixes”. Be sure you are on that tab. The bottom option on that menu is titled “Fill Light”. It is a simple slider. Drag it to the right and you will be amazed that it appears that you are turning on the lights. You won’t believe how well this works with virtually any photo.

When fixing a picture in this way, I like to show people the extreme difference. Take a look at the before picture below.
BEFORE

AFTER

This is the exact same file with nothing done except for the simple “Fill Light” adjustment. When you are done, “Export” your revised file for upload.