[Greenbuilding] Lstiburek... wow.

[George Tremblay]

First, a disclaimer: I am an owner-builder, so can make no claim to the
economic feasibility of any building practice I have undertaken :-).
During a particularly intensive phase of my current perpetual building
project, I hired a 3-man crew that actually nailed up our siding (and the
framing under it).

My wife and I painted the fiber cement clapboard siding and pine trim for
our house on all sides with primer and one finish coat prior to
installation.  The installers whacked the cut ends with a tinted, quick
drying primer as they were cut, and installed them immediately.  Fiber
cement is supposed to be installed with a 1/8" gap at the ends, and filled
with caulk, so the wet ends did not actually butt together.  I don't know
whether this practice would be advisable with wood clapboards.

The pine trim we set aside just long enough for the ends to become
tack-free before installation.  This primer dries quite quickly (20
minutes?), so it was not a major hassle to keep enough work going to be
able to move from one location to another while pieces were drying.  We
used a cheap, sacrificial paintbrush for this end painting, which we would
toss at the end of the day because it became glopped up from sitting in a
small, open jar of primer.

While we had staging installed on each side of the house, we applied a
light gray caulk at end seams, nail holes, and trim seams, followed by a
single finish coat of paint, for a total of one primer and two finish
coats.  Because this involved only a single coat of paint, my wife and I
needed only a day or so on each side to accomplish this task, before the
contractor could move the staging and commence siding in a different
location.

I, too, made a large painting/drying area for the clapboards, setting them
on edge to dry in racks consisting of 2x4's laid on edge with big spikes
nailed slightly into the edge grain every 2 inches.  The drying clapboards
could lean against the spikes.  Two of us worked on the painting, with one
applying the paint with a 6" roller (a roller can be loaded with a lot more
paint than a brush, resulting in fewer trips to the paint), while the other
smoothed it with a good quality brush.  Tedious, but pretty efficient, and
it greatly diminished the painting task once the siding was installed.

Good luck, Reuben!

George Tremblay
Troy, NH


On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 12:46 AM, Reuben Deumling <9watts at gmail.com> wrote:

> I just stumbled upon a copy of Lstiburek's *Builder's Guide to Mixed
> Climates*. I was already a fan of the here recommended *Water Management
> Guide*, but this is pure gold.
>
> I have lots of questions, but the most pressing one is how in practice you
> folks have gone about painting the *ends* of wooden siding boards as you
> cut them in the field? I'm having trouble imagining how that would work in
> practice. I have built large racks on which to dry painted boards, but the
> logistics of cutting, painting the ends, setting them aside to dry, and
> then returning to install those now dry pieces seem daunting. Does anyone
> actually do this? Are there tricks?
>
>
> Thanks very much.
>
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