I recently looked into costs for renting scaffolding or a cherry picker for a house related project that is coming up.

The best value I found was to buy a smaller used lift (cost about $4,000) use it and then sell it when done. Only gotcha is to have someone carefully check out the unit. I expect to get a little less than what I paid, but it works out less cost than renting scaffolding.

Using a cherry picker huge time and effort saver, beats the heck out of screwing with scaffolding.

I found this place, http://www.bidadoo.com/ but there are probably other similar groups near you.

For the siding use any wood but not vinyl. It painfully doesn’t go with a log cabin.