What's Under That? Siding Edition

I'll be the first to admit that the exterior of the house looks... weathered. Or, as our niece said, like a haunted house.

It's a bit gray. Gray is the new black, right?

We knew the siding would have to go. For one, it's gone unpainted for so long that I'm pretty sure it wouldn't really accept a coat of paint. For two, we already had a pretty good idea of what was under it... wasps. Lots and lots of wasps, building their nests in between the top layer of siding and the layer underneath it.

So, on the first nice day of spring, the Great Waspicide of 2017 began. The good part was that they were very, very sleepy wasps. Basically, I'd pull off a piece of siding -- with my hands, because it's really at the falls-apart-if-you-tug-on-it stage -- and then use the pry bar -- and, ok, often just my gloved fingers -- to squish all the wasps. They just sat there and took it.

The lean-to has been the easiest part. Under the hard board siding is a layer of real wood siding, which has now been entirely uncovered and de-wasped, and which after some scraping and cleaning, should be ready to get painted something less pink.

Calling it "cotton candy" instead of "Pepto Bismal" doesn't really improve things.

The main house is harder. Mostly, that's because a whole lot more of it is way above our heads, which so far has meant one person on a ladder removing siding, and the other person on the ground, holding the ladder. This makes for pretty slow going, as it involves a lot of going up and down and moving the ladder around. It's also slow because apparently the one weather feature we can count on up there is wind, which doesn't really inspire one to get up on a ladder to tug at siding.

At this point, we've pretty well decided that there's some bucket lift rental in our near future. But even with just two of us and a ladder, we've achieved almost one side of the house. Ok, it's the smallest side, but still.

This is far less pink than expected.

This new layer of siding is made of asphalt, so it's basically like roof shingles, but as siding. We've been patching up holes as we go, but we're still not sure what we'll do as a final step. We'll probably at least see if this can be primed and painted. From what I've seen, I'm not super hopefully, but I've been wrong before. In the meantime, there's still siding to remove and wasps to murder.