We’re just lived through about a month and a half straight of home-maintenance hell. Somehow we were seized with insanity earlier this year and decided to schedule a complete replacement of the siding on the house for just after we got back from Japan. On one hand this was smart because it meant getting the job done before the summer rainy season. (Boulder actually does get kind of rainy in the summer, although that’s relative to itself. Relative to, say, Oregon it never gets all that rainy. Supposedly it’s sunny here an average of 300 days per year. I don’t know whether or not that includes the numerous days in which it’s sunny in the morning but cloudy and rainy in the afternoon.) On the other hand it wasn’t at all smart because it didn’t give us a chance to recover much from the trip, and it totally hosed my ability to make forward progress with Audio Damage’s projects. But now the end is in sight, and the memory of the sheer horror of it all is starting to fade. Rather than attempt to describe it, I’m going to be lazy and insert a copy of an email that Tracie sent to her brother last week. [We haven’t been able to decide whether “re-siding” is actually a word that means “replacing siding”. Apparently it isn’t, but it’s handy for brevity.]
Well we had scheduled for the old siding to be ripped off and replaced with Hardie Plank (the stuff Mom and Dad are having put on their house) because this house REALLY needed to be re-sided and Hardie Plank is the best siding material. Fire-resistant, doesn’t need to be painted etc…
They were supposed to start on April 18 but didn’t start until May 21 because the company had different people quit, fire their crews, and all sorts of other BS. Before they got started though, part of the prep is to have thermal imaging of your house to see water leaks and what not (basically to protect the company from having you come back and say “well, but now that you’ve re-sided, my house leaks”; they can reply “no folks, it was always there actually-remember that thermal imaging report we did? The leaks are your problem if they couldn’t be fixed in the re-siding”). So we knew we had one leak that was supposedly fixed about 5 yrs ago when they redid the deck etc. but it seems they actually just rerouted the water and never found the real entrance so that one started again a week before the re-siding job finally started. Well, that’s a good thing in a way because now they can really find it while the siding is off and fix it right. That’s the corner of the house they are working on now.
They found another leak on the other corner of the house (the spare room where company stays). Low and behold it was leaking down to the floor and had molded the pad of the carpet (totally without us knowing this). So we had a guy (Butch from Handymanmatters.com–great national company) come yesterday to rip up the carpet, get rid of the nasty mold, seal it in with this cool spray that encapsulates mold, and take a look at how bad the leak was. Long story short is that it was MUCH worse than what any of us suspected. It had damaged the flooring underneath the carpet and rotted some drywall and a bit of the wood behind it. So Butch and Adam crawl up on the roof and find that there’s a 5″ gap in the flashing around the skylight in that room where the water has been coming in since this house was built (20 yrs ago). Butch put a temporary patch on the gap and then it POURED yesterday: no water came in. He’s coming back this Friday to do a much better patch on it and then he’ll return to do the drywall work both in that room, the ceiling of the dining room (which is the floor of that room), and the leak we originally knew about in the window of the basement (cause by the mysterious corner they are currently working on).
The other leak was around the toilet in the half-bath. No problem, right? Adam goes to Home Depot to get a toilet as we saw a hairline crack in the base of the old one. Butch said that may be where the water is coming from (maybe not) but that it would eventually crack through and we’d be ahead to just replace it now. Butch takes the toilet off and finds that the entire base of the toilet where it attaches to the pipe is rusted and nasty so he goes back to Home Depot for parts to fix it. Then he tries to put the toilet that Adam bought on only to find that it’s missing parts out of the box which leads to Adam going back and getting a different one with all the parts present. Only 3 trips to Home Depot that day.
And this was all just yesterday. All of our days seem to be going like this; we are both exhausted and are obviously looking forward to having our quiet, hermit-like lifestyle back! Butch is supposed to finish drywall on June 8 so the new carpet for that spare room is scheduled to go in on June 11. The siding should be done by the end of this week or early next. Who knows when they’ll get around to putting the new gutters on–a different crew does it. We have a GREAT BIG dumpster (and porta-potty) in front of the house, and I love throwing shit into the dumpster. Somehow it is very satisfying; call me silly.
That pretty much captures what it’s been like around here for the last six weeks. Thankfully the siding is done and it looks great. The source of the mystery leak was probably the chimney. Its siding basically fell apart in the hands of the contractor who pulled it off and the flashing beneath it wasn’t really done right. We’re kind of holding our breath, waiting for the next hard rain to put it to the test.
If siding replacement sounds like something I’ve talked about here before, you’re right. Just over a year ago we replaced some of the siding ourselves, as documented in a previous post here. I tried not to watch when they ripped apart all of our lovely work to replace it with the new siding. Naturally we wouldn’t have done it in the first place if we knew that we were going to have the whole house done with Hardie Plank, but we didn’t. So it goes.
