Slate has a well-deserved reputation as a handsome and
long-lived roofing material. But as Sheffield, Mass., slater
John Kuhn can attest, it also makes pretty good siding. Kuhn
sided his own house with a combination of unfading green and
purple Vermont slate, laid 6 inches to the weather. That's
substantially less than the 7- to 9-inch exposure typical of
roofing applications, but Kuhn found that the wider coursing
seemed too crude when seen from close up. Like roof slates,
each sidewall slate is secured with two ring-shank copper
nails; an architect confirmed that the 7-pound-per-square-foot
load represented by the slate wouldn't present any structural
problems.
The unfading green and purple Vermont
slate siding on master slater John Kuhn's modern post-and-beam
house should last as long as the structure itself. The
ornamental "Christmas tree" figure on the chimney chase at
center is a duplicate of one Kuhn found on an old
barn.
A purple slate trim band wraps around
the house at window-sill height. Copper trim strips beneath the
mahogany windows cover the exposed nail heads.
The 16-ounce copper corner trim and
water table were formed on a bending brake and soldered on
site. A right-angle bend at the upper edge of the water table
acts as a "starter course" to hold the bottom of the first
course of slate clear of the sheathing. Each slate is fastened
to the 5/8-inch plywood sheathing with two 1 1/2-inch copper
nails.
While Kuhn started in business as a slate roofer, he actually
does more copper work than slate these days ("If you're going
to work with slate, you more or less have to be a copper
worker, too," he says). The 16-ounce copper corner trim on his
house is bent to the profile of a 1-inch corner board and
soldered to the matching copper water table. A standing-seam
copper roof caps everything off.
All told, Kuhn says, the project took about a year, with the
work moving ahead as time was available between other jobs. But
Kuhn is well pleased with the finished product — and
happy to think that he'll never have to scrape, paint, repoint
brick joints, or try to match replacement sections of faded
vinyl siding.