House wrap is a good start, but there’s a few more things to finish on the back of the house. First, we needed an actual door, since I was using a sheet of rigid foam to block the opening we had cut. As with the other doors and windows, we needed a 2″ jam extension to position the door to the outside of the rigid foam that will clad the exterior over the house wrap. I made this out of 2x4s, with a 1/2″ of foam on the back side, punctuated by squares of 1/2″ plywood where I was putting screws through it. At the bottom, rather than just a 2×4, I built the ledger that the landing will be attached to. This is the same basic design, though, with a 2x board over plywood and foam, only using much bigger screws to attach into the wall studs.
After applying all sorts of tape to flash the thing to the house wrap and allow water to travel around the wood, I ran into trouble when I went to position the door. I swear I measure these things, but somehow the opening was slightly too short. Fortunately, I was able to remedy this by swapping the original rough-sawn 2×4 at the top of the opening with a new 2×4, since it’s only 1-1/2″ thick. Now I was set, right? Of course not. I made the same classic mistake I’ve made before: trusting the house. One side of the door opening is against an existing stud, and like a fool I assumed it was approximately vertical. Since that turned out to be laughably wrong, I wound up having to again swap an old stud for a new one, then add a piece of plywood at the bottom of one side to get the opening a bit closer to an actual rectangle rather than a parallelogram. Ultimately, I did get the door installed and taped.
As with the front of the house, I needed to build the gable soffit, or rake. I had help in the form of Aaron, Dylan, Rob, and Mike. While Dylan trimmed back the original boards, we assembled the new rake in sections, including the angled bottom end that aligns with the side of the house. Despite the heights, wobbly platform, and ladder, we managed to successfully attach it without anyone falling.
Rake installed, housewrap taped
The last step in the process was to tape all the vertical seams in the house wrap, which I did while lowering the platform back to ground level. An additional trip up the ladder similarly finished the right edge of the back, and the whole thing is looking pretty much ready for siding, with the exception of the ledgers, which I have yet to finish.
Before we put siding on the house, we’re going to replace the roof. The existing roof is terrifically old, maybe 10-15 years, but it’s the cheapest shingle on the market, it’s not adhered very well, there are now multiple —and in some cases poor— patch jobs, plus the new front porch and the bay peak, it’s due. That means we have a few more projects to wrap up to get ready for that. Hopefully the weather will cooperate!
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