Installing Cedar Siding on Our Tiny House

Hey guys, it's Lindy! And it's Mike here and this is T.I.Y. The Tiny It Yourself channel and today we are going to talk about how we did our cedar siding. Yep, we're going to show you the process from staining or finishing so that it can handle the weather all the way up into installation and everything. We're gonna show you the whole thing, little hurdles that we came over, stuff like that. Okay, let's do it. All right, so let's talk about the basics of tongue and groove siding really quick. So these are one by six cedar boards. All these principles pretty much are going to work for doing pine tongue and groove inside. But we have a really a five and a quarter-ish piece of wood here and there's only five inches of exposed face on the front once the tongue is inside the groove. And so when you're figuring out how much you need to buy you have to take that into account. See what I'm talking about? And another very obvious point, and I'm sure somebody has done it wrong, but in terms of which way water flows you want to make sure the tongue is facing up and that way the water won't come in. Imagine if it was like that the water would just go whip right into that crack and then rot your wood out. And in terms of tools and cuts I'm going to be doing about 95% of my cuts on the chop saw just in terms of cutting them to length. But when I'm going over a window or something I might need to do a lengthwise cut and I'm going to be doing it on a table saw. Both of these can be done on a circular saw it's just less precise. And in terms of anchoring if you're just approaching this for the first time and maybe you saw the trim video and you're thinking like in terms of trim you might think oh I'll just pop a couple screws right on the front right there. No that is not the best way to do that. I have seen people do that. But you want to be coming in on the tongue downward at an angle onto a stud. Most people with their wooden studs can simply take an air nailer and come in down here right on that tongue and pop into their studs. But since we're doing metal studs we're going to be doing these screws and we're going to be doing these trim screws which have a t10 star bit. I wouldn't want to go any larger than that because it will definitely split this. There's already a potential to split. And when I first started doing it I did split a few but then I got it under control and you just got to make sure you get a sharper angle than you initially would think. So if you're looking inside the wall it's going to look about like that and so you're not going to see the screw head at all which is just way better in terms of moisture. And we're going to get started here in a second but one last point. Our section of wood on this wall was small enough that I could just fit straight 10 inch boards but a lot of people are going to have to be splicing the boards for longer distances and when you're doing that make sure to cut at a 45 degree angle when you're joining them so that water can't get through as easily and then you know take into account that extra three-quarter of an inch length that you're going to lose. Also really quickly can we talk about how satisfying this is this piece that was split does this stringy thing and it's really fun. Okay so it's really windy so I'll make this quick but this is my staining setup. Again I am using the Minwax Hellmann spar urethane which is supposed to be good for expansion and contraction. And our cedar trim video is basically a how to stain the cedar video for the first part of it so I won't go in too much detail here. But since that video in terms of efficiency I figured that it's way better to actually start with the rough side up so you can get a layer on that and then flip it over and then you have your first layer on both sides. And then again we want to do three layers on the finished side and two layers on the back side. This way technically if you wanted to be really efficient you could just do this process twice and then do the third coat on the outside when it is actually on the building. That way you can go from unfinished boards to installed boards pretty quickly. Okay so now I've flipped all of them and I'm ready to do the nicer side and another thing that I learned about this spar urethane is that whenever you have some rough patches like that right there it's way better to deal with them now and sand them otherwise they can be exaggerated by the finish. And here are the details for the sort of finishing schedule you know wet sandpaper and stuff like that and you can pause if you need to read that but for now let's move on. Okay so here I am on the back side of our house. The way we're doing it is metal, wood, and metal again. We've already done one of the strips of metal. We're doing the wood in the middle because we have a pretty intense weight limit and so we're trying to keep it as light as possible and I also like the idea of having all of the weight from the wood directly over the wheels and then we are going to do another metal over there and the metal is going to be in a future video so stay tuned for that. So in other words we're just going to be doing this vertical strip and as you can see everything is flashed out and trimmed out and ready for the siding except there's a little bit of trim I need to do on the top right there. We also have these metal trim pieces that have to go in first. I also flashed out the top of this window which is kind of hard to see and then I used some extra window flashing tape on top of the trim there and as you can see I didn't go out all the way to the edge because the siding is considerably thinner than the trim and this way we won't have a weird flashy shiny strip. We also have our drip edge on there which is galvanized metal and this is what it looks like from the side and it's really a no-brainer to put in you just got to make sure it goes under the house wrap and even if you had the house wrap on you can just kind of undo the bottom slide it in and put it back on that's what we did. In terms of setup and tools I've got a little bit of a workstation here. I got this chop saw at the local big box store for about a hundred dollars and this helmet was the best purchase I've ever made it was two dollars at a local farm auction and I thought it was just headphones in a box and I got it and it was the whole setup and it's eye protection and head protection and ear protection and those just kind of snap into your ears they're great I highly suggest one. Okay so what I found the best thing to do first is to mark out your stud lines so that you can screw into those and I simply did that by finding where the stud was you know looking inside and finding a point to measure from from a corner of a window or whatever and then I used just a level to create the mark and then I went all the way across and got all of my lines so it's ready to go. Okay so this is where we're going to put our first board I'm simply going to measure it and cut it to that angle like I would any other board. All right got the measurement time to cut. Okay so here's the current situation I'm getting a slight gap from that flashing but once I caulk that it should be virtually invisible and no this will not matter because this edge will be completely covered. Okay now it's time to start screwing it in and I'm going to explain this technique in further detail in a little bit and then just on this bottom piece because there's no tongue below it for it to hook onto I have to do some exposed screws which sucks and then I'm also just using this chisel to control the exact elevation of it so it matches my other siding and that this is level. I don't know what just happened but everything looks like it worked out. All right I threw some more of those in and mashed into the studs and I am going to put some caulking over them at some point. Okay here's a good little learning experience I always try and go three inches in for the last screw at least but since there was that little knot there and I wanted this to be really tight and I was like I'm gonna try and just pushing it there on the end and it just obviously split and so if you ever have a sketchy situation like that you can always pre-drill you know occasionally it's not that big of a deal but it is holding it in there and as I put the next one on I'll just crank it so that it pushes that back into place and then I'll caulk it at the end. All right next board I'm gonna go ahead and do a crazy one I just marked it out because I'm trying to get some variation going on and I have a lot of crazy boards left so I'm gonna pop one in right now. Got my trusty block here. That right there is the goal so the beveled edge meets the beveled edge and now you can't see that crack that was there at all. Okay so I popped all the top screws on and thankfully of course we do not have to do any screws on the bottom because the tongue on the one below it just catches it and holds it in place. Okay so that's it for today I'm just going to call it a day and come back and finish it later. All right it's another day and it's super nice out and for this next piece I'm running into a little bit of an issue or just a little challenge that happens when you hit trim and that is if I were to just keep on going straight it would just hit it and so I have to cut out a notch and it's about a half of an inch sliver that I'm going to cut out on the table saw going forward so that this next piece is going to fit right onto this trim. All right I've got my table saw here ready to eat away about a half an inch strip on the bottom of the board and in case you're wondering it's a Craftsman Evolve it's a really good deal it's like $130 online and it's been great so far so let's do this. All right so I just cut the strip and ended it at the point where the diagonal starts and so I'm going to go and finish the rest with a Japanese saw. Looks great. All right now we're going to see how well it fits. Wasn't super tight so I'm just going to shave a little bit off so you can see I kind of marked it in pencil and then we'll see what happens. All right now that that piece is on it's about as good as it's going to get there's a little gap but I'll caulk that and it won't be noticeable. Now as I go upward it's really important for me to keep it level and it's easy on each one to maybe go an eighth of an inch higher on one side accidentally and it can get pretty far off and there's a lot of ways to do this I could just be measuring down from this guy I could do a horizontal level line but for now I've just marked two inch lines as reference points on each side to follow as I go up and that way I'll be perfectly level when I hit this. And here's sort of an exaggerated example of what I'm talking about. On one side you can be almost down with no gap at all and then on the other side you might have a pretty big gap there but it doesn't actually look that different from straight on. All right so things are coming along pretty nicely as you'll see I just have this gap here which happens to be just a normal piece with the tongue on the top cut off but because we're not going to be able to sort of wedge it in onto the tongue with this trim here I'm gonna have to cut that cut out at an angle down as well so that it doesn't get caught on that corner and it can kind of just be plopped in and into the groove at the same time. And that's gonna end right here I'm gonna leave the tongue on on the edges and awesomely all of the little pieces of scrap I have are longer than this gap so they're gonna work. And here is a better perspective on the progress which may be like a third of the way up not even but I think those uh little sides of the window are gonna go pretty quickly and another project that I'm working on which is pretty fun and stay tuned for it is making a 3d printed adapter for a downspout there and then I think we're gonna do rain chains which are cool so that they're gonna be easily removable and you can travel with them and they'll look nice. So here is the cut that's the outside of course a bird pooped on it a bird's pooped on like half my boards and then we've got a slight angle there it might be kind of hard to see on camera and then the notch there it was a little bit difficult just had to angle the table saw cut a little notch for the table saw blade to go in and start and then just go down. Little moment of truth situation here so I'm gonna come in kind of like at an angle like this I think my angle was a little too minor I could do it I could do it it might just be sketchy. All right I simply dulled the edge that it would catch on with a chisel really quickly and I'm actually uh being uh brave enough to just finish it off and try it and I already put stain on it because I'm feeling risky the worst thing that can happen is that the tongue on the other one just deposited because it was taking forever but I got it in and it's a super tight fit and nothing snapped off so I'm feeling pretty good about it I'm just gonna screw it in and and sadly I'm gonna have to have exposed screws right there because there's no tongue to catch it but I'll cock them up as usual. So tight I don't know if we can appreciate this because there's a bevel there but that is there's literally no gap. All right so we've made it to the top of the window on both sides and in case you didn't notice I have put flashing tape there instead of the flashing I had before. Flashing I had before was this sort of homemade piece of over window trim flashing which I did out of some extra aluminum flashing and this hand seamer here but it wasn't really laying flat and it was kind of uneven because it was done by hand and so I just decided to go with the tape. But now as you can pretty easily tell by where this ends we're gonna have to do sort of the opposite of what we did on the bottom of the window and just notch out a bottom chunk here. Thankfully it doesn't have to be at an angle or anything like that because it's just gonna go downward onto this tongue. Okay it was super nice and all of a sudden it's gonna rain so I'm calling it a day but this is the piece I just cut. As you can see it has this notch taken out all the way down to the other end and that'll just fit on either side of the window hopefully. All right I'm ready to put this guy up there. I hope that everything magically fits but something tells me there's gonna be something wrong. So I hammer one side tight and the other side loosens a little bit and I hammer that side the other side loosens but I'm just gonna go ahead and screw them in and I think it'll just even out. Okay so the one right above the windows is about as good as it's gonna get it's all screwed in so I'm just gonna go and do three more which are pretty straightforward and I'll throw on a time lapse real quick for that. Okay so here I am up on the scaffolding and I've just got two pieces and some slivers to do on this side and of course this last piece of trim which I'm going to do in a second. Okay now that I have this last piece of trim up and this board I can determine that the base of the valley trim here is gonna be about an inch into that board so I'm going to cut out a notch the shape of the valley and in order to slide it in I am also going to have to cut it at an angle in the back and wedge it just like that board below the window. So hopefully you can see what's going on it's pretty subtle but I made this cut on the Japanese saw it's really just a V that also is angled that way a little bit and it ends about a foot down on each side so I'm gonna go ahead and try and put it in. Okay so this is gonna be a bit of a gamble but we're gonna see if it fits. Needs to be hammered in at the same time that it gets pushed back. All right I was able to pop it in the camera actually ran out of space but it's in there and I'm gonna have to go ahead and screw it in and do maybe an exposed screw here but not too close to the drip line in the center and for a better perspective this is the current situation super close to being done. All right so I cut this piece with the Japanese saw and the next step is going to be removing this back groove and I'm going to go ahead and do a little bit of an experiment and leave a bit of the back groove here so that I don't have to put a screw through here and risk splitting it but normally I would suggest just taking the whole back off. Okay so removing the back part of the groove could be done a few ways just a table saw rip would be really easy just setting your blade to like a quarter of an inch and about three-eighths inch over and then just shredding the back of it but since this is such a short piece I am just chiseling it off along a line that's about three-eighths of an inch from the back because that's how deep the groove goes just like that. Okay now that I finished the chiseling you can really see what we're trying to do here see how you can just pop that on the top pretty obvious but I'm also going to try this situation here where I've got just a little bit of the groove left on the end and we're going to hopefully be able to wedge it in and uh we'll see it might just break and as usual I'm going to make sure that all surfaces are stained so I'm going to go ahead and stain the part of the groove that I just knocked off and of course the ends and everything that I just cut. Another somewhat obvious thing but I think it's good to mention if you have to cut out a lot of these you don't have to go ahead and measure what your angle is every time you can simply take this and scribe your angle onto the piece you need to cut. All right moment of truth on whether or not keeping a little bit of a groove was a good idea if it will fit or not all right ah yes it worked. Sadly I still have to do at least one exposed nail here screw. So I'm gonna have to go ahead and put this one on from the roof but just to mention one quick strategy I could simply take that little piece of trim off and then slide in with the full groove on but I don't like the idea of putting that trim on and taking it off and sort of loosening up the screw holes and the wood that is holding the screw holes in so let's go for it bumblebee. Well we hope you learned something on this video stay tuned for our next video which will be about how we did our metal siding in conjunction with our cedar siding. Yep hope you guys learned some stuff had a good time putting on the siding all right so follow us on instagram and keep watching and thanks for watching. If you're gonna tell us that we did everything wrong then you can leave your comments in the trash. See you next time! Bye!