After fours days of searching, driving 30+ miles, and cajoling a small hardware store into making a purchase order to a distributor (thank you Tennenbaum Hardware) for me, we finally got the balance of the caulk that we needed to finish siding the house yesterday. I have not spent much time in this space mentioning specific companies mainly due to it not being the point of this blog. However, in this case a lot of credit is due to the fine people at Nu-Puttie Corp in Maywood, IL for being patient with me and helping find a way to get me the caulk we needed to finish this job. Its funny, but sourcing the remaining three cases of caulk in the same color as the siding was one of the biggest challenges of this entire project.
I have to say, it was worth the effort. Its really nice to see the exterior of the house come together. Furthermore, once I saw how the caulk looked in comparison to clear caulk I was very happy with the result. You can see from the above picture that the caulk almost exactly matches the siding and provides a very nice transition to the trim around the windows.
Here is a shot of the front and side of the house with the siding finished. Its important to note that there is a lot of work to be done on the soffits and fascia yet. That will essentially make all of the exposed wood you see around the roof line framed in black alluminum fascia and black gutters. I think the finished product is going to look really good when its replete with gutters.
Here is the back of the house. As you can see, Fabian of Castro Roofing and Siding is doing the final work with the caulk on the seam where the siding meets the corner trim. The two most important places for the caulk to go when installing this siding is at this location as well as arond the windows and doors where water can seep in. This is why they end up using over 3 cases of caulk on the entire house.
Here is a shot of the east side of the house. Its hard to make out, but you can see there are two exhaust vents coming out of the side of the house. These are for the furnace and the bathroom fan on the second floor. These are required by code and unavoidable. I would love to be able to not have them sticking out the side of the house, but there is literally no way around it.
I have been focusing so heavily on the exterior of the home, very little attention has been brought to the electrical work that is being done in the house. The above picture is of the "naked" panel that will eventually have all of the wires and circuits for the entire house. The rough electrical connection to the city - called the service - is in and just needs wiring run through here in order to be connected and providing power to the home. I say "just" but its truly a ton of work. I am actually very intrigued to see how it all ends up working as it seems to be a very laborious process wiring a house with all of the conduit and boxes already in place.
On another electrical note: We did officially decide to put a backup generator into the electrical infrastructure. I ordered the generator a few days ago and the boheamouth (3' wide x 7' long) was delivered yesterday. The 8kw generator is quite a large item.....lets just say I wont be moving this thing around myself. There are two main reasons we decided to put in the generator: Reason #1 - With the backup battery for the sump pump (a reliable one) being over $1000 and a surge protector/backup power for the data room being another $5-600 we were going to be close to the cost of a generator and only be protecting two things in the home. The 8kw generator has 8 circuits and will be able to protect both of the aforementioned items along with the fridges, oven, basic lights in the house, and furnace fans. All of that for a bit more money was a no-brainer. Reason #2 - putting in a backup generator is 100 times easier when you are putting the electrical infrastructure in the house from scratch from a labor perspective. As a result, if we were going to do it, now is the time.
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