Rich Martin discusses cedar siding in this segment of Living at Home.

Siding that was used for a long time many years ago is seeing a comeback because of its durability and its texture that adds to your home.

On one particular house, we are removing the aluminum siding that once was here, put on back in the 50's and 60's, and we are going to restore this house with the shingles.

The cedar shingles come in a natural state. There is no finish on them, although you can get them already pre-stained, or pre-paint it. That is a little bit wiser to do that than, in fact, to do it when they are all in place.

What we want to do is coat the shingle equally on all the sides. Then we just hang them on the line. Why do we do this as opposed to spraying them in place? We want the back side of the shingle to be covered with the paint and or stain. The reason for that is when the shingle gets wet and the sun comes out and drives the moisture into the shingle and it makes the shingle over a period of time, cup towards the sun.

To stop that and give us longevity, we want to completely coat it so that the first time they go on the house, this is really the best way to do it. Either get them already pre-done or do it yourself.

After we have taken the aluminum siding off of the house, the next step is to put a house wrap on so that the moisture doesn't get into the walls behind our cedar.

The next thing we put on is a thing called cedar breather. This is a sub-straight that goes on that allows air to flow behind the cedar siding, so once these shingles get placed on there, such as this, the air is allowed to travel underneath the cedar and on up and out the soffit areas. This allows any drying to take place if we do have moisture on the back side of our shingle.

ajl