Front done - 3 days work

The in-law's came to visit, so I took advantage. Tony (father-in-law), my dad and I worked for about 3.5 days.

Here's the "before" picture. I've already got a walkboard set up on the left.

I think Dad is scraping old caulk. Since we were focused on getting siding up while Tony was here, we didn't completely re-work the window yet (caulk, reapaint, etc), but we had to get the outsides cleaned and painted to put siding against it. You can see my mom tearing off siding on the right. She enjoys demolition, and I think she'd like to manage this project since she's always wanting to give advice. We're usually too stubborn to listen. Sorry, Mom.

We're putting up this 1/4" polystyrene board on top of the blackboard and then we cover it with Tyvek, taped at the seams. The blue board, as we call it, comes in pieces about 4'x50', folded every 2 feet (for about $34). It only provides about R1 insulation, but it also brings the new siding out a bit, which works better around the windows. It's probably overkill to have both Tyvek and blueboard, but you can't seal around corners with blue board.

That's Tony, Dad and about to put up the last board.

It looks much better! But, there's a lot still to do.

We left a lot of details incomplete because we just wanted to get the siding up. We have to replace the ~1x8" board that runs against the house just below the eves (Is that also called a fascia?), replace the soffit under the 2nd floor bump out, paint (and eventually replace) all soffits, eaves and gutters, do some work around the downstairs windows, etc. Still plenty to do. Everything takes longer than you expect.

You can see the new insulation that I added under the upstairs bump-out. The insulation was really lame. I hope it's worth it.