After hoping off a plane from Philadelphia, I hopped into the basket of a boom lift. Tyler and I were planning on spending our Labor Day weekend siding the upper parts of the house with the help of a lovely all terrain 44' boom lift. As you can see, the thing was bigger than my truck and horse trailer combined! Even the pups were fascinated by it as Tyler jumped in the basket and fired it up.

To get use to handling the lift, Tyler first used it to replace the yard light that had been burnt out for most of the summer. This one job alone probably saved us enough money to pay for the rental on the lift.

Tyler and I decided to start with the worst looking portion of the house, the top half of the NW wall. This portion of the house still had the multiple layers of old siding that needed to be demolished. While Tyler worked on pulling down the old siding, I worked on carrying it over to the dumpster. Tyler's mom and dad even stopped out and helped pick up debris while there was an open house at their place.

Once the old siding was done, Tyler and I worked on putting up the new siding. When I had done the starter strip for the siding, I had found it difficult to get the strip lined up on both sides of the patio door. So as the siding started to go up on the back of the house, I was happy to see that the siding on either side of the patio door was lining up.

By the time we were done with the back wall, it was the nicest looking part on the house.

It was time to hit the North side of the house. The North side presented a new challenge... the peak. Since we found it difficult to find the right angle and cut it on the saw, I ended up cutting all of the pieces by hand once we got to the peak.

Tyler and I decided that one way or another the front of the house would be sided before the boom lift was picked up Tuesday. Our marathon siding session had left us short on supplies, so I started working on hanging more siding while Tyler ran to the store. With Tyler on the ladder and me in the lift, we were making really good progress on the house. Unfortunately, there was a lot of progress to be made. So, true to our OCD and crazy nature, we broke out the work lights and kept going well into the night and the next morning... 4 o'clock to be exact! But, we won. Before we went to bed, the entire front of the house was sided! And, we went to bed happily thinking about the boom lift heading down the road in a few hours.

Tyler and I received the, uhm, good news that the boom lift wouldn't be picked up till around 5pm since the rental store hadn't dropped it off till around 5pm on Friday. Oh yeah! So, after a trip into town for lots and lots and lots of caffeine and sugar, Tyler and I returned to siding.

We moved the lift to the South side of the house and worked on installing the last attic window and all of the J-channel for the siding. Since we assumed the rental store would be out around 5pm to pick up the lift, Tyler and I had a short day. Around 5pm, Tyler headed off to his bowling league and I loaded Evan up for his return to the trainers. But, when I got back from the barn the lift was still in the yard. Hmmm, they must be planning on picking it up tomorrow.

For the love of... is THAT LIFT STILL HERE?! Tyler and I got home from work to find the lift still sitting in our yard. With tears in our eyes, we decided that if the lift was still there that we should still be making use of it. This time, Tyler hopped up into the basket while I hooked up the trailer and headed into town for more siding. Since we were going to be working around the power line and it was getting dark, I prepped the generator so that we could kill the main power and still have light. Thankfully, we ran out of TyVek tape and it started to rain! Yes, we were about ready to drop dead so the rain was a good thing. But, we had managed to get the worst parts of the siding (the soffits and J-channel) up.