Not much to look at yet, but I have been making slow, steady progress on the Queen Anne rowhouse. The first task was siding. Usually I have sloppy edges because I know they’ll be covered with trim. Since this house has panels that open, I tried really hard to keep the edges that will be exposed neat and straight. (They’ll still have some sort of trim on the outside, but not on the inner edges that will be visible when the panel is open.)

Here’s one wall. I did a decent job making the siding match up on the left part and the panel, but the right part got all out of whack because of the bay window, which was not easy to add siding around with it already glued into place. (If I’d built this house from a kit I would have made a template of the roof shape before gluing on the bay.)

Where the panel and the right side of the wall meet, it’s obvious that the siding gets out of sync about halfway down. Even with strip wood on the edges to provide a bit of separation, I think the mismatched siding is going to look cruddy. Originally I’d planned to center the chimney on this panel, but am now thinking about offsetting it to cover the seam between the two pieces. Then the fact that the siding doesn’t line up will be less obvious.

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After last weekend’s impulse buy, my eagerness to get started on the Queen Anne Rowhouse was thwarted by my lack of any actual plans for it. I placed some orders for doors and windows and got some books about San Francisco painted ladies from the library, but much of the week was spent thinking and planning as opposed to actual doing.

I want the house to look more or less like a traditional San Francisco Victorian and was interested to read that the garish, colorful paint schemes you usually think of for San Francisco houses weren’t popular until the seventies. (The hippies started it!) I’ve decided to use more subtle colors, with a facade on the bay window that will add a splash of color.

Here are some color swatches from paint samples I had handy. The neutrals at the bottom are all rejects from when Geoff repainted our office earlier this summer. I decided on Behr Baked Scone for the house. Some of the purple and green swatches might end up as accent colors, I haven’t entirely decided yet.

I started gluing on siding with the front, back, and one of the panels. I decided not to side the bay because I’m planning to add a bunch of trim, and siding underneath that seemed unnecessary. (The photos I saw in the library books supported this!) Used heavy paint cans and lots of masking tape to keep the siding flat.

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