Exterior Wood Wall Replacement.

It's a rainy cool summer's Sunday and finally I find myself with some time to sit down and spend a few hours uploading pictures & update you all on the progress that's been made the last 2 1/2 months.

Lots has changed! First off my wife's pregnant with our 2nd child who is due end of January 2012. Learning of this, the urgency to complete the house before summer completely vanished. We feel blessed to have a sibling on the way for our daughter so the two of them can play & together enjoy the outdoors that will soon surround their home.



In hindsight I can see now there's no way we'd get all that's planned done by then anyway, so the new target is end of October, when the weather will be cool & comfortable to make the move from Shizuoka.

This is a much bigger project than I'd originally envisaged, not least because we keep finding things we want to have repaired or replaced now rather than leaving till later and being a perfectionist Arnie needs time to consider the best solutions, discuss, fine tune then put thoughts into motion & change.

As we looked closer at each aspect we'd find we had to replace large surface sections than leaving them as they were, or do considerable repairs.



Some of the wooden exterior wall had become very thin & cracked from weathering over many decades & had holes where knots had fallen out, etc, so they were replaced. This wasn't just a matter of cutting to size and replacing planks, but included routing channels in the wood to fit splines in between (& allow for expansions & contractions from heat & humidity) & coating with odourless creosote for protection & making the wood look original. The fit that resulted was so perfect no insects will get through.




Arnie routes a channel for the spline to fit inside a wall plank.


Shinobu screws new wood into place.



A sign of a good job. All new & creosoted wood (right only) looks as old as the rest of the house!



New wood before being creosoted. The reverse side was sealed with silicone and walls will be insulated before being finished with plasterboard on the reverse side.


Some of the wattle & daub wall's coating is cracked, so we removed weak parts - to be repaired and repainted (White) later.

All the exterior wood will also be darkened & preserved with odourless creosote, but bearing in mind the timeline this will only be completed after the interior's been finished to make the house habitable by our family!