Hello all, I was looking up information on housewrap, and stumbled upon this website, what a great find. Anyways, I’m hoping to get some information/advice as the best way to go about doing some renovations this spring/summer on my house

First off, I live in Topsfield, MA, the house is a cape (built in 1960), and the person we bought it from didn’t do much maintenance and what was done doesn’t look like it was done by contractors who knew what they were doing. We had numerous ice dam leaks (both through the roof and various replacement windows) during last winter’s epic snow storm. The house is vinyl sided (vinyl siding over 3/4″ foam board, over cedar shakes over tar paper over 1″ nominal planks mounted to the wall framing). Also, most of the windows in the house have been changed out with replacement windows and the exterior trim of the windows were wrapped with aluminum (very shoddy job, because many of the windows leak). We ended up getting a decent claim from the insurance company for last years ice dam damage and I want to do a bunch of projects that will tighten up/make the house more weathertight/upgrade the house.

So I have a couple issues I would like to solve….and am looking for some help from this site to steer me in the right direction, please let me know if this makes sense.

I want to rip off the current vinyl siding (for numerous reasons), then the foam insulation under the siding, the cedar shakes, the tar paper and get it down to the wood planking (no sheathing anywhere in this house), then install the zip wall system sheathing over the entire exterior of the house, then rip out all of the replacement windows and install nice good quality energy efficient new construction windows throughout the house. Then have an insulation company come in and install new dense pack cellulose insulation in all of the exterior walls, then install new vinyl siding over that.

My thinking for this is that I would be able to kill three birds with one (kind of) stone. I would be able to get my walls properly insulated (new dense pack cellulose), get new watertight windows (new construction windows that are properly installed and properly flashed) where right now I have improperly flashed leaky windows (both air and water) and also make the house look much better (new vinyl siding in an actual color I want) while at the same time closing up the majority of the air gaps around the exterior walls (the planks that the cedar shakes are installed upon have anywhere from 0.5″ to 1″ gaps where they butt up against each other), looking for some advice/opinions on this plan….

Lastly, after having a bunch of roof leaks from last years ice dams, I know that there isn’t any ice and water shield installed anywhere on my roof decking, it’s just tar paper. I am going to be installing a solar system on my roof this year and will be replacing my roof before the install happens so I wanted to ask whether it makes sense to put ice and water over my whole roof then shingle over it or just install it up about 6′ from the edge and in the valleys?

Thanks in advance….