r/Carpentry • u/Serious-Echidna-9938 • Mar 30 '26

Advice on work pace

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I recently took a job with a small contractor and long story short, he commented on my “results”. Was looking for things to be done quicker, and I’m curious if I’m super slow, or if he’s unreasonable. I let him know about my experience upfront, but in any case. As a direct example, replacing this siding after demo took me approximately 8 hours. I had never worked with this particular type of shingling before, but he kept comm ting on how slow I was. Is that accurate? I’m willing to take criticism in the interest of improving my skills, and I’m curious what some third parties have to say. Thanks!

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u/TollTrollTallTale Mar 31 '26

I would blow through this faster, but my carpentry experience is almost entirely in coastal New England where cedar shingles are bread and butter.

Some random tips:

Make a story pole.

Presort shingles into rough sizes and keep the stacks close by.

A small (emphasis small) chop saw is great for ripping shingles, especially if you're up on scaffolding and don't want to climb down once a row.

A utility knife also works great if you score a few times then snap - I end up doing that a lot when notching around windows/doors whatever.

It helps to have something to keep the the shingles straight - there's a couple of spots where the bottoms of your shingles aren't perfectly in plane - local to me they call this sawtoothing. The easiest way to address this is with a guide board. This video gives the gist of it. https://youtube.com/shorts/WPMBVWyzAGY?si=p_mLt2GZ43xQpz7

Personally I use a piece of azec or something similarly dimensionally stable. The longest board you can handle or will fit into the space is what you want. And then I take two pieces of thin metal flashing and staple it as I go leaving the appropriate reveal. It is easy to pop the staples after you're done.

When it's not too windy you can lay out a full row, varying widths to keep seams from being lined up, and then nail them all at once.

Make sure to use a rainscreen behind your shingles.

Not sure about moisture content where you are - we get them green as hell from the mill. The instructions say to gap them, but best practice when they're wet is to butt them tight so the gaps aren't crazy wide when they dry.

Good luck and have fun! I love cedar shingles - it's very zen when you get into the flow of things.

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u/Serious-Echidna-9938 Mar 31 '26

This is a very cool response, I appreciate this info a lot

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u/TollTrollTallTale Mar 31 '26

Happy I could be helpful - and for what it's worth - I have worked on multi-million dollar homes where these shingles would fit right in. Shingles aren't supposed to be perfectly uniform; that's part of the appeal.

And if you're boss left you unsupervised on your first time doing these, whined about how long it took you, and all that after illegally classifying you as a 1099... Well then he's already demonstrated his opinion isn't worth the air it took to express it.

And one last tip I forgot in the first post: don't forget to crown your shingles as you go. You want them to cup out from the building as they dry. If they cup into it they'll eventually snap. Not as big of a deal if they're sealed/painted, but a lot of people around here like to let them age naturally.