Hey hey! Hope everyone had a nice Valentine’s Day whether you spent it with your love or yourself or your cat, whom you refer to as your love. 🙂

I’ve actually skipped away for a few days with my BFF to warm and sunny … Chicago.

Yeah, not sure how that happened, Chicago in February that is, but we’re hoping to spend some time walking around with our cameras since she just got a new one so you may end up seeing more of our trip than you hope to. 🙂

But, I have a HUGE tip for you today. One that I feel like I should have known. Or at least I should have deduced. (Just because I wanted to use that word in a sentence.) Because it actually makes total sense, I just didn’t realize it. And it’s about how to caulk exterior siding and why not to caulk newly installed pressure treated wood.

So, pressure treated wood is lumber than has been chemically treated to resist against rot, fungus, insects and other random grossness that happens when things live outside. When we built-out our exterior wall over the old faux brick that was all done in pressure treated plywood. And then when my dad and I tackled the exterior trim we used all pressure treated lumber as well.

After we had all of the trim installed and had a solid start of the hardiboard siding installation I got busy with some caulk. (Please resist the urge to giggle.)

Any guesses how many tubes I’ve used so far? 12 tubes so far.  And I’ve declared 3 tubes at a time to be my limit. And I haven’t even started on the soffit or any of the areas above the porch roof. But I will. Soon.

But I need to thank my 3 tube limit for giving me the time I needed to learn this tip.

Here’s what happened, I jumped right into the caulking after the trim install and, for the sake of using arbitrary percentages, completed maybe 20% of it. But for some reason, to avoid getting into the monotony of caulking under every single row of siding, I did all of the windows and the door first.

And then, declaring this job the worst ever, and taking a few weeks away from the madness I discovered this.

Cracks! In my caulk! My caulk had cracked! I was far too perturbed to even consider giggling at the idea of it.

But then I noticed something else.

The caulk was still perfect in the few areas I had caulked along the siding.

The thing is, over time the chemical treatment in the pressure treated wood dries out and the wood contracts and literally gets a tiny bit smaller since it’s not now swollen with moisture.

That left my gaps bigger and the need for a larger more caulk.

Just to try to induce some extra sympathy let’s look at all of the pressure treated wood we’re working with.

That’s every window (there are 5), the door, every corner transition (there are 6, and 2 pressure treated boards on each outer corner, of which there are 4), the top of every wall where there is a trim board right below the roof (there are 2 roofs or is it rooves, like hooves?).

But, I was thankful to have learned something new, and to have a built-in excuse for procrastinating getting started on the caulk above the porch roof. Since it was just a crack in the caulk and not a new crack in a hard surface material I didn’t have to do anything crazy like cut out all of the caulk. Thankfully I could just run a new bead of caulk and chalk it up to a lesson learned.

And a few more caulking tips while we’re on the topic:

• don’t cut too much of the tip of the tube of caulk off, it is easier to control with a smaller opening, but not too small, large enough to have enough caulk come out to work with, I would say a 3 mm opening, google it, that’s what I did (random fact, a standard pencil eraser is 5 mm, you’re welcome)
• don’t be afraid to make a mess, caulk is pretty easy clean up and as long as you work in small sections and stay ahead of its drying time you can always clean up after yourself
• keep a wet rag or sponge with you, you know, to clean up after yourself
• I’ve seen a bunch of different tools but my finger is still my preferred “smooth out” method, especially around uneven surfaces like siding
• this will happen

You’ll be going along, creating a nice seal with your caulk …

And then you’ll need to pause for a second to wipe or smooth or clean up an area and because of the pressure built up in the tube it will just keep on coming out, even though you don’t want it to.

I just slop it up there and smooth it out as best I can with my finger.

And then smooth it out with the rag.

And you’ve got yourself a nice cleanly caulked seal. After you’ve let the pressure treated wood dry out for at least a week of course.

Update:  Some readers have sent other great tips, if you have any you want me to add please feel free to leave them in the comments. Like:

• when you are finished laying a bead of caulk, relieve the pressure on the gun by releasing the plunger
• when you’re finished, close the tube with any unused caulk using large electrical wire nuts <- we wrap the end in painter’s tape, but I really love this idea, too

The reality is these tubes of caulk, even the good ones are only a few dollars so you could just wipe off the tip of the tube and sacrifice those globs of caulk, but I can’t get myself to through out even pennies worth of it when I know it can be used. What’s that they say, a penny saved …

As of today, to toss out another arbitrary percentage, I would say I’m about 70% complete with the caulking project (just on the front of the house where the new siding and trim is), and I have to admit, I won’t be sad to see it end. But after I itemized all of the next steps with the exterior work here to get ready for a whole new paint job, I’m not exactly jumping up and down in excitement over my work ahead. Thank goodness for good music and happy hours.

Joel made an unfortunate realization around here the other day. Actually, unwittingly, I kind of surrendered my hand, and gave up a bit of my DIY strategy. We were hanging out with friends and talking about the house and they asked “how do you decide who does what when it comes to house projects?”.

Totally joking I said “I just ask Joel to do everything I don’t want to do”.

(Clearly someone has been dismantling pallets around here.)

This, my friends, turned out to be a classic case of foot in mouth disease.

See, Joel decided to put some serious thought into this strategy and proclaimed “HEY, that’s exactly what happens”.

Doh!

Dangnabit!

Goshdarnit!

I’ve been figured out.

Luckily my partner in DIY crime kind of likes me and indulges my frequent requests to do all kinds of random tasks from manning the insulation blower from the attic to doing the dishes.

(I did much more than this picture implies on insulation day.)

So it came as no surprise to him when I declared grinding off the nails on the underside of our patio porch was his job.

We exposed the ceiling joists on our porch roof back in September, when we removed the luaun that was on the ceiling to uncover that the porch wasn’t even attached to the house.

With that porch roof now securely attached and the hardiboard siding installation finally complete we keep plugging away on the front of the house, making some exterior progress, a few small projects at a time. We are working towards a pretty traditional southern porch ceiling look with exposed joists and the ceiling painted blue. The end result will look something like this.

(I can’t find the original source for this photo anywhere so if you know please let me know so I can add the link here. Thanks!)

But, unfortunately what we uncovered under the luaun was just the plywood our metal roof tiles are nailed into. And unfortunately those nails all poked a little bit through so we needed to get rid of them before we can forge ahead with installation of bead board between the ceiling joists to cover the plywood.

Enter Joel and his experience with the scariest tool he’s ever used.

Here’s a shot with a few of the nails poking through circled for a little visual help.

We borrowed the grinder from our contractor friend, he had used it to grind down the length of our bolts when we replaced our patio posts and left it with us to use for this project.

You might remember the tool scared me then, so I had him grind down all of the bolts, even though he only helped me install the first patio post.

And Joel was left in charge of grinding down the bolts we used to install our post bases.

I did some research online and these tools are sold with a guard, which was the most nerve-wracking part of the one we borrowed, there wasn’t a guard, or anything separating the spinning blade from our precious fingers.

And that baby throws sparks, Joel put on a long sleeve shirt because he could feel the sparks when they hit his arms. So, needless to say, safety glasses and leather gloves are also a must with this tool.

But, as intimidating as it was, it was definitely better than the time and energy it would have taken to use a hack saw and cut each nail by hand.

Here are a few affiliate links to check out the tool more closely. This is the Dewalt grinder we used, but with a guard, and here is the blade we used. For as heavy-duty as the work they do is, the blade is very thin and breaks easily, I cracked one just knocking it on something when I was putting the tool away, luckily the blades are only a few bucks a piece.

But I didn’t leave him totally alone, while he was tackling that I was working to prep the area in between each ceiling joist for new trim.

Way back in September we decided to just build out the old wall to cover up the faux brick facade instead of going though the effort to remove what we heard from many sources was a messy, hard to work with, chicken wire covered with stucco situation.

But the contractors only built out the wall to the bottom of the porch roof because we hadn’t exposed the ceiling joists yet. With a bit of remedial math and scouring our scrap wood selection to try to use what we had on hand we determined that the width of one 2 x 4 plus one sheet of 3/4″ plywood (which is what they used to build out the wall over the faux brick) is the same as the width of 3 layers of 3/4″ plywood. 2 1/4″ for anyone who doesn’t want to whip out their fraction math skills. And we had a bunch of scrap of 3/4″ plywood leftover from the previous exterior work so I just cut it up into pieces that would fit in between the ceiling joists and installed it in stacks of 3 with our framing nail gun.

Then we measured a little more precisely and installed blocks of 2 x 6s with our finish nail gun. And to create one long, clean line of trim for the hardiboard siding to butt up against we ripped a 2 x 4 into a 1 1/2″ square on our table saw and installed it right below all of our newly installed blocks.

Clearly I did that little project before we finished the hardiboard siding installation. But we were just talking with our friends about this scary tool so it reminded to give you a little update on that bad boy, which has somehow morphed into this little last bit of exterior trim work.

And here’s what it all looks like after hours years spent caulking.

And here’s an arrow happy slap happy indication of what we’re working toward, with arrows indicating colors, but by no means scientifically color-matched. Think of it more of an “in this general shade” guide.

And the door, the navy is just my latest idea, there is a house in our neighborhood that caught my eye that is gray with a navy door. What do you think? Would navy go with oil rubbed bronze hardware? I kind of love our light and would hate to paint it since it is hit by heat of the day sun for a bunch of hours every day and I just think spray paint wouldn’t hold up in the long run. And I want the door hardware to match the light finish. What about red for a door color? I put some red flowers on the porch the other day and kind of really liked how the red looked. How did you decide what color to paint your front door?

And the stars are going to be bevelled glass, we just ordered 6 pieces to replace the painted plastic, I know, classy, that is in there now. I was going to put a red arrow on the door too as a color option but with the stars it began to look a bit too, oh I don’t know, American flaggy for me.

If you happen to follow along on Instagram (@thespacebetweenblog) you saw that we tried out a new paint sprayer and the exterior color. It’s just a trial run and a little to get the front of our house a little more presentable for the ‘hood … but it sure does have me dreaming about getting the rest of the exterior prepped for a full on spray party. Which means power washing, scraping old chipping paint, caulking where necessary, priming as needed and then paint. Why does the fun stuff always come last?