Tyler and I have continued to work on the siding. My horse trailer has been converted into siding central. Why? Because it is 16 ft long and can easily hold all the boxes of siding and the various strips of trim. The trailer has worked out well since it protects everything from the rain and it keeps the wind from carrying everything off.

With the bottom half of the front sided, Tyler and I turned out attention to the other sides of the house. First, we started with the South wall since it was the most visible and thus bugged us the most.

Next, I moved on to the North side of the house. Why the North? Because it was going to be a heck of a lot easier than the West side with the chimney and sliding glass door. Unfortunately, my trusty level failed me. I didn't notice the failure till the top of the siding had reached the windows. There was about a two inch difference between the bottoms of the windows and the top of the siding. I ended up having to rip off all the siding and starting over again. This time I quadruple checked the starter strip with two different levels. Once everything was straightened out, Tyler came over and helped me finish up the bottom half of the siding

With nothing else left to do, I started working on the West wall. The West wall was going to be challenging for several reasons. First, I had to make sure that the siding on both sides of the chimney lined up so that if we ever get rid of the blasted thing we'll have an easier time splicing in new pieces of siding. Second, I needed to make sure that the siding on the back of the house lined up with the siding on the sides of the house. Third, I had to get the siding to line up on both sides of the patio door. Fourth, the old foundation for the beauty parlor was higher than the first row of siding on the South wall.

I ended up using one of our plumbs to run a string from one corner of the house to the other at the same level where I wanted the starter strip for the siding to go. I selected the second row of siding on the South wall so I could make it over the old foundation for the beauty parlor. I then used a string level to level the string on either side of the chimney. This helped me find that there was about a 1" difference between the starting heights of the siding on the North and South walls. To compensate, I split the difference and had both sides of siding on either side of the chimney slope about a 1/2" to hide the difference. It took me the better part of a day to finally get the starter strip to where I liked it.