In the Doghouse

The most fun thing lately is our little dog house. We’ve decided to work with Domingo, the very talented framer, to do the metal siding. He has never done it before, I’ve never done it before, and we’re both nervous about making a really big and expensive mistake. So we built this little closet thing to fit under some exterior stairs on our house as a model. It has most of the features of the bigger building, in a more convenient snack size. (Like everything on our property, it is WAY overbuilt. In this case that’s because we built the whole thing out of scrap lumber left over from the building framing. The only long stuff we had left were big 4″ x 6″ timbers, so that’s what the dog house is framed with. We could also use this as our tornado shelter.)

Josh at MBCI takes the dimensions and the materials we want to use, and he works to help me figure out what we should order. I feel like a complete idiot after he explains how trim is applied to metal siding. I’ve been trying to figure that one out for weeks, and it turns out that it’s very simple.

The biggest frustration of the day is with that nibbler. It does the job just fine — on relatively flat sheets of metal. The PBD panel we’ve chosen has dramatic corners to the corrugation and there’s no way for the nibbler to cut it. I end up using a cutting disc on a grinder, which works just fine (though it does go through discs quickly.) It looks like that $400 nibbler was a waste, for this project at least.

Here’s the very fancy doghouse, almost at the end of the day.

Key findings:
- The most important piece is the first one. Make sure it is absolutely level. You can’t correct for this on later panels.
- Start from the bottom and work up.
- Make sure the corrugation is a perfect fit when overlapping pieces. If this gets off, trim won’t fit correctly and the corrugated panels won’t fit properly later.
- When trimming around an opening, Use a big piece that covers up part of the opening and cut a hole out of it for the opening. It may be a more efficient use of material to piece it together from parts, but the seams show much more.
- Use high speed drilling, but don’t use too much pressure. If the drill slips, it will leave a mark on the metal.
- Trim is laminated with a protective plastic wrap. Remove before applying to building.
- On interior openings, trim the bottom first, then sides, the top.
- Don’t screw everything down too tight initially. It needs to be loose to apply trim and re-tightening destroys rubber
- Cut from the back of the material so that if the grinder slips, it doesn’t mar the good finish
- Hide joins by cutting on the underside of the hills of the corrugation
- Measure the placement of screws so that they form a nice, straight line
- Start on the far side of the building, so that as you overlap panels, the joins are not as visible from the front
- Wear gloves to keep skin oils from getting onto Galvalume. Over time, these oils harm the finish and show up as fingerprints.
- Don’t get too caught up with making perfect cuts. It’s nearly impossible and the trim covers up almost every imperfection.