new member - siding replacement

[mike]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post here. My wife & I are just finishing up a new siding install on one side of our 1982 14x54 champion. We're going to re-side the entire mobile but are doing one side at a time so we don't bite off more than we can chew by ourselves. We were almost finished with the siding before I stumbled onto this website a couple of nights back while googling what to do about the mini-sized rain gutters down the road. There is such a wealth of information available here, I've visited almost daily, looking for ideas on how to do other things and finding answers to other needs our mobile has such as patching a section I had to cut into in the underbelly a while back, and replacing the rain gutters. I was glad to hear there is an informative book on mobile repair available here - I've always been pretty handy, but mobiles are just different enough to make this kind of book a necessity for us DIY'ers.

We've owned this home since 96' and while there are some things they could have done better during construction, we've found it to be not too expensive or difficult to upgrade and repair and we've become pretty attached to it.

One thing we were concerned about from the beginning was the factory installed siding. I'm not sure what it is but it looks like it's 4x8 sheets made out of compressed cardboard with a tar-colored backing, fiber-board or something, masonite maybe. It had a several bad spots in it when we bought it, and started deteriorating bad around the bottom and side edges about 5 or 6 years back. At the time, We trimmed off the bad parts, replaced with plywood strips, caulked and repainted, and it looked nice, but it sure didn't last long. When we took it down last week, it was like tearing paper or cardboard apart. I knew it was in bad shape but I didn't how serious it was. There was almost nothing left but the nails, and the paint and caulk. I suspect it was in much worse shape than it appeared to be back when we did our repair on it. Also, there was no sheathing of any kind underneath the siding, just bare wall studs and insulation.

We replace several bad 2x4's around the window frames, and several pieces of insulation that had obviously been wet a number of times. We covered the entire walls, top to bottom with roofing tar paper in horizontal runs, starting at the bottom and overlapping each successive layer over the one under it, and then we used premium grade pre-primed lap & grooved wood siding in 4x8 sheets. It went up pretty easily and the lap fit right on the studs like it was supposed to which made it easy to keep leveled as it went up. With the new siding and semi-gloss paint, and new brass exterior light fixture, it looks like a completely different home.

We've still got a little work to do. Our water heater sits on a slab in a little shed that was attached to the back wall. The old shed was torn down to replace the siding behind it and has to be rebuilt. I moved the water heater outside a year or so after we bought the place after a leaky water connection ruined the bathroom particle board flooring causing me to rebuild the entire bathroom instead of just fixing a leak. While I had things opened up, I also replaced about 80% of the leak-prone gray water lines with pvc, all but the ones going to the kitchen sink which i still need to replace, but I see most people are using something else for that here, pbx which I'm not familiar with.

I would sure recommend to anyone that has this type of siding on their mobile to remove it at the very first sign of trouble - don't wait around like we did.

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone sharing their information and experiences here, and share my own recent siding replacement experience. This is site is a very valuable resource for all mh owners.

[Yanita]

Welcome Mike,

Glad you found us.

Thanks for sharing your experience with us.

Please feel free to jump right in on current discussions.

Go ahead and complete a profile on your home, this enables us to help you quicker.

Look forward to helping you in the future.


Yanita