products galore: siding is purchased

just to remind you of our original vision of the exterior of the house here is the rendering that my grandfather completed for us back in october.

as you can see from the rendering the right side of the house is a grey-brown vertical barn wood as is the future garage, the area under the front porch is seen as horizontal white painted siding, and the left "house" is vertical painted wood siding in a reverse board and batten style. we also envisioned white trim board framing the geometry of the house which we really liked.

well, as usual we started thinking and looking a photos and researching material options.  one of the biggest hurdles björn and i have encountered is the insane number of choices for every material and product out there.  and the internet doesn't help it just opens up a world of possibilities which when one is trying to make a decision can be a huge hinderance.

anyway after looking into cedar siding, stained new pine siding options to look like old barn wood, and a "barn wood" product made from old beetle kill or forest fire pine we decided on a few things.

montrose, colorado

we wanted real barn wood, old, grey, weathered barn wood- period.   so that is what we were going to get.  all said and done the old barn wood was not cheap but with all of the staining and/or finishing that a new piece of pine would need to simulate old wood the cost was very comparable.  we searched reclaimed barn wood online and found a lumber yard in nearby montrose, colorado that had beautiful hardwood boards.

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southern wood imports had a wonderful selection of bundled reclaimed hardwood as well as reclaimed pine boards and beautiful reclaimed timbers.  we drove the land cruiser (sherman) and the trailer (kiwi) to montrose to pick out our siding. 

björn watching the guys load up our siding

björn and i chose to purchase hardwood siding for a number of reasons.  hardwoods have a beautiful grey finish when weathered and these woods are a mixture of white oak, chestnut and hickory from barns in tennessee.  because these are eastern trees that also means that here in colorado there aren't many (if any) bugs that are adapted to eating these hard woods. most of the wood infesting pests are used to sinking their chompers into soft delicious pine.  that was a huge reason NOT to use pine, the other was that over a long period of time pine can weather to a black color out here in the colorado sun.

we chose two beautiful bundles of grey hardwood varying in widths from 4 to 12 inches with the majority of the pieces being around 6-8 inches and about 12 feet long.  kiwi, the trailer did an amazing job hauling this wood over three mountain passes! one of which is the infamous million dollar highway from ouray to silverton over red mountain pass.  needless to say i was a little nervous that sherman wouldn't make it but it was easy-peasy!

woo hoo all loaded up!

i thought i would share a photo of the million dollar highway
so that you could get the idea of its scariness!  

the wood ended up being $3.80 a square foot and we purchased about 1500 sf for a total of $5,700.00 to cover half of our house.  when we start to think about some of less expensive siding options we start to feel a little crazy spending so much to make our house look old, but we really hope that our little project will look amazing and we think that this beautiful material will make that happen!