May 2015: I started the Arthur as part of a Greenleaf community build in 2005, and at the time we blogged our progress on the Greenleaf forum. After a few site upgrades the old community blog has become hard to link to and I’m redoing my website anyway, so I decided to move those posts over here and backdate them. Sorry for any weirdness that results!

So, I glued the gables on. Next step is supposed to be the porch but since I haven’t painted yet, that should come first. I decided to use siding on this house so obviously that has to go on before I paint. Of course, as I thought this through I realized I should have done the siding before adding the roof (or at least the gables) to make it easier to fit the siding on the triangular parts of the walls. Oops.

First, I used wood filler to seal up some cracks where the walls went together. There will be trim covering these on the outside and wallpaper on the inside, but I just wanted to make sure the cracks wouldn’t be visible from any angle.

Then I started my siding. I am using birch siding from Corona, which comes in individual strips. I cut several strips to size and started with the front of the house. The siding cuts easily with scissors. The edges can be sanded with an emery board.

I’m bad at drawing straight lines, so rather than draw guide lines on the house, I am using a 3/8″ wide piece of balsa to make sure that each strip of siding is the correct amount of space away from the one below it.

The strips are curling as I glue them on, so I am putting on a few, weighting them down with paint cans, and waiting them to dry before I do a few more. This is time intensive, obviously, but no more so than gluing on other pieces of the house. Next up, after siding: paint!