Brand new siding!

September 30, 2012

Boral Tru-Exterior trim and siding are going up

Ok, Aluminum siding is great, long-lived, recyclable, reliable... but the stuff we had on our house was definitely ready for that recycling phase. We needed a new skin. And even though we had to spend the vast majority of our budget on fixing hidden problems, we still wanted to do something fun to make our new home look great, work well, and leave us alone for a good long while.

Addie Atkins came to visit Rachel's office in Cambridge with a new product called TruExterior by Boral. It's 75% recycled and rapidly-renewable content, it uses a by-product of coal plants called fly ash, and it's almost magically stoic: doesn't soak up water, doesn't shrink or expand much, doesn't even give our carpenters lung cancer when they work with it. Right now it's only made to be trim, but we thought we could try to stretch that a bit.

At first we considered reverse board-and-batten siding, but we were advised against that because of the difficulty of lining up vertical battens with irregular studs. But Addie found us a mill that would cut the trim into real siding shapes, so we were able to design our own shiplap siding. Then we found out that the material and milling costs made this whole idea beyond our budget. But Boral saved the day again, and found us a pile of factory seconds that we could use at a fraction of the price.

Now a lot of the trim is up and the siding is going up fast too. You can see how much this stuff bends when it's not supported, but it turns out that's a good thing when our 120-year-old walls aren't straight at all. The brown color is a primer that they use to make sure you paint the material - the process they use gives different colors in every batch so they don't want anyone to leave it unpainted for aesthetic reasons. The brown is kind of growing on us! But maybe we're just happy to see how sharp this new siding looks on our old, battered house. Starting to look up!