siding - we are making progress at last

now we are finally at the point were we can put the siding on the doghouse and I'm proud to say there are still 0 screws or nails used so far and it is rather sturdy and gets more and more stable with every piece I add.

I'm also started to realize that it's not the power tools, which are expensive and needed. The most expensive part so far are accessories and wood. Like it's just ridiculous how expensive clamps, chisels or saw blades are.

Anyway since I can't use nails to attach the siding, the only choice I have were to use dados. Which are frankly one of the easiest joints to make (if you got a dado blade or a router)

basic concept of a dado joint

Since this project is getting more and more expensive and I'm way over budget by now, I ended up buying cheap cedar fence boards and cutting them to size and plane them to 1/2 thickness (since my largest router bit is 1/2"). And during this process I learned that cedar wrecks absolute havoc with my planers dust collection. Basically the 2" hose I use to connect the planer to my shop-vac keeps getting clogged all the time and forced me to disassemble the planer 3 times to clear out all the stuck shavings since there is not enough suction. I start to see the point of commercial dust collection systems with 4" hoses.

After planning all the cedar, cutting it to size and routing the dados in the struts we ended up with something like this

first parts of the siding are fitted

 Now since the cedar was considered green, it promptly shrunk by about 1/2" over night and left me sitting with something like this...

after a night of drying some of the walls shrunk...

Which means we need to cut some form of outside molding to make it look pretty and make it windproof. Maybe some rafter for the rain run off...