Improvise

Whatever the project, you'd better schedule time to improvise. This was our second little problem that came up (first being the no-insulation place where the fireplace would have been - earlier post).

This was shimmed out because on the other side of this corner board, it meets the brick on the front of the house, but the bricks weren't parallel with the wall. We decided to fill the gap and caulk it since from the front the problem would be more obvious. The dust on the boards really shows. This stuff blows a lot of dust when you cut it, so wear a mask or hold your breath during short cuts.

Now we have a big problem. I had two pallets of Hardi Plank (fiber cement board) running along the driveway. The boards slowly began sliding down the hill. At first I put a door in front of them and two garbage cans full of water. That slowed it down a lot (lasted for a month), but it finally gave way and as you can see, boards slid off completely. Also you can see mid-way up, under the stack are some bricks where I had jacked it up a little when I first noticed it sliding - oops not enough.

Four at a time, we moved the worse stack to a new pallet that we fortunately had from my dad's house.

This is what we ended up with. We jacked th heck out of it until it was level, or just a little high on this side. We jacked up the other pallet with a hydrolic jack. They hadn't slid off quite as much. But, I hurt my back trying to slide large numbers of boards back into place.