Welcome to This Ole House…
The thing about working on houses is this: it’s not like on TV. You see, on TV they announce that the entire plumbing has to be redone for the bathroom – and then they cut to commercial. When they come back the segment generally starts with “Well, we took care of rerouting the plumbing to the other wall and running the sewage drain for the toilet…” Oh really? In three minutes? That’s pretty quick.
Jerks. lol
My buddy Tom (no, not the AVRant guy – that would be akin to asking me to help an elite squad of Navy Seals to plan out a penetration plan for the capital of Siria… hmm, what IS the capital of Siria anyway?) Anyway, my buddy Tom-not-Andry is going to come in Wednesday afternoon and we are going to rip off all the vinyl siding that has all but desecrated the character of my 1920s Bungalow home. We are also going to pull off the underlying wood siding… Why? Because it’s pretty messed up too, and it’s easier (and actually cheaper) to replace the siding with Hardiplank than try to fix the damaged spots, scrape off 87 years of old paint and repaint it. Plus, once everything is off I can insulate the house.
That’s right, these old houses have ZERO insulation. Zip. Nada. Dina’s love for technical discussions (sorry, ran out of analogies for the concept of “none”). Putting in R-13 won’t change the world, but it will cut down on my monthly bills, not to mention it’s good for the environment…. Mwuhahaha… haha… ahem. Sorry.
Well, it will make this a very nice feature when I go to sell this house in a year or two.
Oh and we’re replacing all the windows. And fixing the trim.
And we’re doing all of this in 10 days. Yeah, go ahead… give me the blank stare of denial. Everyone else does. Well, Tom and I are very goal-oriented and we’re simply going to make it happen. And pray very hard… which is likely going to have much more effect on our results than anything else.
So here we go – want to take bets on how far we have? There are 198 linear feet around my house, so you can bet as a percentage of the whole or in actual numbers. I don’t care – I’m going to get it done. And when I do I’m going to take a break… a long one… maybe go fishing. Yeah, I like fishing.
Then I suppose I’ll start thinking about painting. Sigh.
Just so we’re clear, it isn’t that I CAN’T do manual labor, it is that I WON’T. On my house… maybe. Running wires? No problem. But personally, my time is more precious that whatever it would cost to get someone to do it for me. If I were more skilled perhaps I could justify doing some of that type of stuff myself but I’m not, so I don’t.
I don’t know how many houses I’ve been in where the people took it upon themselves to paint and you can see the piss poor job they did. A buyer is going to look at that and think of all the work they’ll have to do to fix it. Or half finished hardwood (mostly pergo) floors that HGTV has convinced people it is “no big deal” to do themselves. While I’m sure Clint and his friend have the requisite skills, if it were me, I’d rather have a professional than risk ruining the outside of my house. I’d probably paint it myself but I don’t know that I’d install it. Even with Jimmy’s help.
BTW – I saw on HGTV or DIY that siding is the #1 way to increase the value of your home. I guess, conversely, done wrong it is the #1 way to reduce the value. Good luck Clint.