I am planning to re-side a house that is currently clad with old v-groove redwood siding. Some of the redwood is in good shape, and I would like to salvage the good boards to the extent possible, so that I can flip the boards and re-use them elsewhere. I know that the boards will split at the first sign of a cats paw or pry bar. Can anyone suggest a good way to remove redwood siding without damaging too much of it? Keep in mind that I will not be exposing the originally exposed (painted) side.
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Replies
You may be successful punching the nails through with a slim punch.
I've removed about a thousand square feet of 50-yr old 1x6 T&G redwood from a hotel recently. It was all blind-nailed through the tongue with box-head nails. After sacrificing a few starter-course boards, I was able to work down the boards with a mini flatbar and pry them up 1/4 inch or so at each nail location. When I tapped each board back down, the nail heads stood up far enough to either pull with a pliers or pry out with a block of scrap between the bar and the nailhead.
It actually went pretty fast and rarely left any marks on either side of the board. I rarely had any problems with wood splitting except the occasional tongue. I did find that the back side of the boards had greyed out quite a bit. It took a lot of sanding, or even planing, to get down to the nice red-brown wood on the backs. Turned out it was less work to just sand and re-stain the old exposed side. Also because of the blind-nailing at an angle, there were holes beyond the tongue and into the meat of the boards on the back sides.
Thanks for the great information!