First, our neighbor from through the back field (Hi, Mr. Murray!) stopped by. He's known a few of the folks who have lived in our house over the years and often has some insights on the "repairs" they had done before. Apparently, the whole house used to be a cranberry color that we can still see in some patches on our shed. We showed him some of our ripped up cranberry painted flooring and mentioned that the color had been inside too. Someone must have loved it! We chatted siding (as yesterday's pictures showed, we had to remove some from around the bottom to do our work) and he asked if we planned on keeping up the old farmhouse look with the original wood plank siding.
As much as I like the look of wood plank siding, as you can see the house only has that on some walls. Elsewhere it has asbestos shingles. Asbestos, you're probably aware, is kind of a dirty word. However, there IS a difference between working with and inhaling asbestos 40 hrs a week versus living next to stable asbestos shingle that don't break, crack, or dust up the place. Just like there' s a difference between living at the bottom of the ocean versus living on the beach. One will kill you, the other ain't so bad (my dad's metaphor.) We told our neighbor that while we hadn't decided, we were pretty sure that eventually ALL the siding would go and we'd get something new. (By the way, ALL the foliage touching the house in that picture is g.o.n.e. Yay!)
Later this afternoon, a guy who lives in Harrington (20 miles south) and occasionally drives by stopped in. Guess what he wanted to ask us about? Siding! Apparently, he had some asbestos shingles from his own home and was wondering if we could use them, seeing as we were doing construction and already had them up over 60-70% of the house. We said 'no, thanks' and shared our strip-it-redo-it plan and then asked how exactly he had removed his own siding. We had heard that since asbestos causes cancer (just like nickel, talc, the sun, sawdust, diet coke, vinyl, glass...), we would need to pay some certified dudes thousands of dollars to remove it. Not so, said our new best friend. Apparently, if you are the homeowner, and you follow very specific (but totally doable) instructions that he has at home and could drop by, you are allowed to remove them, wrap them, and dispose of them at the local dump. Yay!
My dad says it's like having a lawyer: you can pay a pro or do it yourself legally, but you can't pay a non-pro. So we could pay the pros or take these down ourselves for a teeny fraction of the cost. With what we're saving, we can afford to wear dust masks...
Inspired, I flipped through my issues of House Beautiful to find the examples of siding on Newell Turner's Twilight Field. And there it was! May '08! He used board-and-batten vinyl siding from CertainTeed. The same fine folks whose insulation is in our walls! Of course, squirrels made nests in the insulation which attracted a snake who we've caught and released at least half-a-dozen times, but that's another story for another day...
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