In getting ready to sell their home, some clients wanted me to remove an old air conditioner and patch the hole. It was quite unsightly and hadn’t worked for years. It was a straightforward project, but I can understand how things like this get put off. (I have stuff like that around my house too!)
Anyway, after getting the unit out and not breaking my back, I removed the old trim, etc. from the A/C hole. Once I got down to just the framing, I added a couple nailers and started putting things back together. The siding was 1×8 beveled spruce which was easy to replace.
Thankfully, the hole was directly between two windows so I didn’t have any weird seams to deal with. If you’re patching a similar hole, try to not let any two pieces of siding end on the same stud. Try to overlap to make it less obvious that there was once a hole here. This may even require cutting and re-installing some existing siding so that the breaks are in the right spots.
With a little caulk and paint the homeowner said something like, “You’d never know there was a hole there!”
That’s about the best compliment I can get.
-Peter
