House Siding in Process
I have failed to show the front of my house yet, and there’s a reason for that. It’s really ugly. As in, “I’m embarrassed that’s my house” ugly. There’s a lot of reasons for the ugly: Old splotchy painted rotting wood shakes, peeling trim, falling-down guttering, runaway landscaping: it’s ugly. But this week, we’re making significant progress: we’re getting our house sided and the guttering replaced!
When we priced house painting, which is a short-term fix and doesn’t factor in all the wood rot repair and guttering issues, it was like $2500! And we’d have to do that over and over again! So we decided to bite the bullet and finance the whole siding/guttering thing. We’ve barely scraped by during the “rainy season” (ie. Spring) the last 2 years with bad gutters and flooding basements. I’m really scared to do that again. My dad recommended the people who did sided his house, and we got an estimate and went from there.
We’ve lived here a year and a half, and sure, I’d love to redo our exterior with cedar shakes, but let’s be realistic, this isn’t Martha’s Vineyard, it’s not in our budget, and that kind of investment isn’t going to pay off in our neighborhood.
Before:
This gives you a good idea of what the house looked like, even though this photo is in the middle of the siding process. The far left side of the photo near our garage has already been sided, the far right (a guest bedroom) has been stripped, and the middle part are the original poorly-painted creamish shakes with dark green trim.
During:
See that flower bed all saggy and sinking? That’s gotta go before they get to that part of the house with the siding. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before they started. Having decided we wanted it gone, I blazed forward in traditional fashion (have you seen what I’ve done to the bathroom?) and got Tommy, our room-renting friend to go after it with a pickax. We discovered just how much dirt is really in that flower bed (A LOT) and how rotten the shakes and wood were behind it (I-punched-hole-in-house), and that’s when our wonderful Hispanic siders stepped in to help out our little porch project.
Flower bed Demo:
After:
As you can see, the ugly flower box is gone, I’ve painted the green front door Martha Stewart’s Sea glass, and found a wreath on sale at T.J.Maxx. I’m still not sure if I’m happy with the front door color – I think I want something a little more Tiffany blue, but I’m going to try this for a while. We also got a new doorbell button and porch light fixture from Home Depot (and this one over by the garage) that actually work now – yeah! Our fearless siding team installed them for us, which made life simpler. The planter and little boxwood is from Home Depot as well, they had their shrubbery on clearance for winter. I love boxwood. The rug is from Pottery Barn – a wedding gift from someone I’ve never met who frequented this website. I can’t tell you what a special privilege it was to receive a wedding present from someone just because my website blessed them.
There are a few items from Pottery Barn that I still want for our entry: some twiggy house numbers and their Aviary Mailbox. Ugh, why is it so expensive?
