Buttoning up the shop continued

I am ' ' that close to finishing the upper siding on the North end of my shop...

 after Dyami gently chided me into putting Tyvek up, I went ahead and picked up a roll... Man that stuff (and I suppose all construction materials) has gone UP in price. When I bought some during the initial phase of building the shop it was about $30 a roll... $50 was quite the shock. Thankfully the one roll will be plenty for the two sections of shop wall I'm working on. 

naturally enough I had to remove all of the boards I put up before my last post. I was dealing with my ladder phobia...(technically a Landing Phobia... as in Landing after a fall...) and working alone putting up the tyvek. An approaching storm put a pause in, and I decided to shoot a quick video... my first youtube share in fact. 

 

I took a day or so of cutting pallets up to mine more wide boards and managed to get things to this point:

I quit for the night when my drill driver died (again, I have one pair of new batteries and several old ones which don't hold a charge well...).
As it turns out, that gap was just a shade over 4' long... for my purposes a 4' pallet board worked just fine to fill in. I have several gaps on the wall, oh well, that's what the tyvek is for.  Aesthetically I'm very pleased with the weathered board look. If I had more time and money, I'd re-side the entire barn in rough board and batten and let it weather. In the meantime the pre-painted sheet goods are just fine.

 

I 'ran out' of loose wide boards at just about the right time point. In my initial try (pre- tyvek) I had stitched in some narrower boards. This time around I used all 'wide' boards for the first six courses. Just about at the hip where the gambrel roof angle is, I switched over to narrow boards. I suppose it meant I had a few more trips up the dreaded ladder, but I survived. (No unanticipated flights or landings so far).

Now, I mentioned I 'ran out' of wide boards... almost. I had one left which was loose, and I decided to use that to fill in the peak section of the siding. The blue tape is how I am attempting to hold it together for the install. I start all of my boards with screws so that when I'm up on the ladder I simply (ha!) have to deal with screwing them in.
 Note to self, pick up another #25 Torx bit before you work on the south end of the shop...

And this is where things stand... I got up to the top of the ladder and was starting to screw in that assembly when another panic attack struck. I somehow managed to control the drill driver,  then I tossed the assembly to the ground. After gathering my wits, I slowly climbed back down. I've figured out that the angle of the ladder has a lot to do with my comfort level. I'll re-adjust later this morning and see if I can't wrap things up. I figure I've got that one assembly, plus backfilling with two or three rows of narrow boards yet to go. I may even trim off that bit of tyvek on the upper left, the boards are flush with the OSB, the tyvek is just extra. 

One Step Forward, One and a half back... Shop update

Hi gang! I''m finally going to post a bit about my shop, or at least about one end of it.  I built my shop back a few years back, and I basically 'ran out of steam' when it came to siding it. I  still have some pre-painted OSB product to hang on the one end of the building, I must admit I've been 'bad' and left the outside of the OSB shell open to the elements. Hasn't hurt it so far, but I've decided to git'r'done and finish the siding.

I'm not all that happy working on a ladder to begin with, so I'm certain that one reason I  haven't hauled the sheet goods up to the top of the shop is that I'm not all that interested in testing out how fast I can fall off said ladder with a 1/2 sheet of OSB.  To that end, I've decided to join the pallet recycling movement. I broke down the skids and wound up with a pile of typical pallet wood. I'm only using the top and bottom pieces, which I used my recip saw to cut from the stringers.

 I managed to get about 1/3 of the space filled in with the wood I harvested. I used the wider boards first, then realized that three of the narrower boards would equal two of the wider boards. I filled in as much as I could before the battery went on my drill/driver, leaving one odd shaped hole...

 I trimmed the board roughly to length... then had to trim just a smidge of of the one tab on the end. 

Here's a shot of the hole filled in. I really like the varied patina. I called a buddy of mine when I ran out of boards, and after a quick bite to eat, I headed out to his family business. They make and refurbish pallets. He said they had a bunch of salvaged wood and that I was welcome to pick through and haul away as many as I cared to take. #bonus!

My youngest son Pat and I loaded into the wife's Escape and headed to East Herkimer.

During the afternoon I tweeted about my accomplishment and Dyami Plotke of the Modern Woodworking Association Podcast chimed in, asking why I hadn't put house wrap up on the wall, and wouldn't the OSB rot when moisture got behind the pallet wood.  Being a true nerd at heart my iPhone does push tweets when I'm mentioned by my @artisanboards tag... so I had about 50 miles to think about the whole tyvek thing.

My first knee jerk reaction was to 'say'... it hasn't hurt it in the last 8 years, (as you can see, the OSB is well faded), but then I realized that I was Being a Jerk.  SO on my way home, I took some Birthday $ and bought one roll of 3' high Tyvek. Sheesh was that expensive, there is house wrap/Tyvek on the lower section of the shop, but I hadn't purchased any recently... $50 later...

so +Dyami Plotke you 'shamed me'  into doing the right thing. Since I'm 'finishing' the shop I might as well do it as well as I am able to within my very limited budget. Tomorrow morning I will climb back Up the ladder, and remove those boards from the shop. Then (presuming I can find the bag of special plastic tabbed nails, (I Think I know where they are, but don't quote me),   I will tyvek the wall, and then reinstall the boards. If I don't have the nails, I will simply staple the tyvek up, as It will be immediately covered with the pallet wood siding.  If I have any energy left after that, I've got another 5 or 6 skids worth of material to sort through and cut apart. I figure that I Might get the North wall (shown) completed with what i brought home tonight.