Trimming the outside

One of the things that Seth has been saying all along is that trim makes the style of the house.  He’s said it about both the inside and the outside.  It’s a good thing he’s been so adamant because when it comes to details like that, I don’t really have an opinion.  Isn’t that terrible?  For me, aesthetics generally take a backseat to price, so I expected to wing it when it came time to do the trim.  Seth, though, has had an idea in mind of building a house inspired by the Craftsman era of design: 1920s bungalows full of simple lines, natural light, and beautiful wood.  We looked at pictures online for months.  Truly one of the nicest rabbit holes we’ve followed in this project, and I’m glad we went in this direction.

After much research and deliberation (as per usual — boy, we’re true to form here!), we designed the window and house trim.  Most Craftsman bungalows have painted siding with natural wood trim, but we flipped that on its end because we like our natural-looking cedar siding so much.  Seth came up with a pleasing angle for the pieces of trim directly over the windows, and we went to town cutting and painting, including cutting the sill piece at an angle to allow water to run off the top.

We picked 5/4″ x 4″ trim for the rails and sills, 5/4″ x 6″ trim for the top pieces, and 5/4″ x 6″ trim for the corners.  We wanted solid wood trim but it wasn’t available in our price range and thickness, so we ended up using a brand of finger-jointed pine called Centurion, which comes factory primed.  From what we hear, factory priming is important to the lifespan of the trim.  We painted ours on three sides with Behr Premium Plus Ultra exterior satin enamel paint, and left the primed-only side facing the house.  We probably should have painted the unexposed side as well, but we were pressed for time — can’t put up siding without trim in place, after all.

The final step in all of the trim work was to add a piece of aluminum drip edge to the top edge of the top piece, forming another barrier against water intrusion behind the windows and protecting the wood from water exposure over time.  You can see it in our photos, a thin white piece of metal that hangs just slightly down.  We attached it to the trim and Blueskin with silicone, taped off the top, and installed the siding directly over it.  It gives a nice detail to the windows in my humble opinion.  Am I biased?  Does my baby poop through a dozen diapers a day?  Yes.  Yes she does.