It's NUDE! (Or, We Took All That Aluminum Siding Off ... eep)

OK, so here we are. Things continue to progress slightly over-budget and behind schedule, so, situation: normal. We’ve also hit the point of very frequent, “oh wait, now we can’t…”’ moments. I kind of thought these would come earlier in the project like, “oh wait, the wall is full of sludge, now we can’t afford floors.” But, no, no, the devil seems to really be in the small details where the plan collides with the real world. An example:

Soffit Struggles

Part of opening up the first floor meant putting some huge beams in place of the old walls. Sometimes you can “tuck” beams up into the floor joists that they support; however, in our case, the beams were left below the joists because 1) it was structurally better and 2) we needed to run some plumbing in the same places as the beams anyway, so, no matter what, something would be poking out of the ceiling. So, we knew there would be some big soffits along the ceiling when all was said and done.

Then the plumber ran the new sanitary lines from the second floor bathroom(s) along those beams, and along the way he had to make a couple of bends. Because of those bends, the plumbing was taking up a lot more left-to-right space than we expected; like “over a foot” vs. “a few inches.” Obviously one does not want one’s poop highways exposed to the world, so a soffit would have to be built around the plumbing, including those turns.

Now, that extra room wasn’t just open, free-for-all space. In fact, the extra-wide soffit would interfere with some pendant light fixtures that we were VERY attached to and had already bought. So, now we’ve got a good old fashioned turf war; queue the dance-fight!

Now, kudos to the electrician because he was there to start installing some of said fixtures and actually stopped work to be like, “hey, I don’t think you’re going to be happy with where these end up because this soffit is now in the way.” In my opinion that’s much better than, “I just jammed this in here because that’s where I could make it fit, so, smell ya later.”

So, this saga is still, as yet, unresolved. It looks like there might be a way to make the plumbing a little more “compact” and fit things basically the way they were supposed to be. If that can’t happen, we may have to make the soffit EVEN BIGGER to create a new space from which to hang the lights, but at that point it’s less a soffit and more a … ceiling … feature? I need someone from HGTV to give it a trendy name. To be continued…

The Exterior is NUDE

The exterior of this place has been a bit of an albatross around our necks since we found out that we couldn’t fully re-side it with something like durable, maintenance-free Hardie Board. This is because once we removed any of the existing siding, the pearl-clutchers over at the Landmark department were going to make us restore the 100-year-old wood siding underneath. Which lives right in the middle of my favorite Venn diagram:

For a while we actually considered trying to keep the aluminum siding and repairing it or painting it or something, but that was just a horrible idea and the very definition of polishing a turd, so, nah.

So, our GC got a quote to remove the aluminum siding, repair what wood needed repairing, and repaint the whole thing. This was based on a certain assumption that the underlying wood siding was in mostly-decent condition, which we gleaned from basically peeking under some small sections of siding.

So, we got the quote back, and the amount of money requested could buy a year of schooling at a pretty good university in the year 2019. So, I said to the GC, “that’s too much money” and somehow he got them to lower the price by an amount of money that could buy a year of schooling at a decent state school. So, that was better. Now, this quote was predicated on those same assumptions about condition. If they took that aluminum off and the condition was much worse than expected, I’d probably have to start googling things like “black market to sell a kidney near me.”

So, to manage some of that risk, we decided to just take the aluminum off the back of the house, which we figured would give us a much better idea of what everything else looks like. Now, in truth, if they took the siding off the back and the results were bad, I don’t know what recourse we would have actually had, but … it felt better to do it this way?

Anyway, the morning they were supposed to remove the siding from just the back of the house the GC called me and said, “yeah, they’re just going to take it all off right now actually they’re already taking it all off right now actually it's basically already off.” So, at that point we were IN IT. The great news is that the condition was basically as expected and I get to keep my vital organs for the time being.

So, here's where we are. It looks kind of equally crappy but in a "it gets better" way ... right?

Paint Colors

So, the thing about “you’re fixing and painting the wood siding now and it’s happening RIGHT NOW” is that we needed to actually pick which color to paint it ASAP. And because the temperature in October decided to unceremoniously plummet to near freezing, ASAP meant IMMEDIATELY, THIS ISN'T A DRILL. So, we did what any rational people would do:

1. Used powerpoint to mock up various color options
2. Sent them to friends for a sort-of straw poll
3. Ignored a lot of their opinions
4. Drove around the neighborhood, laptop open, to see how our mockups fit in with neighborhood vibes

We settled on a two-tone grey-green, which is pretty in keeping with the neighborhood. Being in a historic district has given us higher-than-usual sensitivity to people judging us for things like exterior color choice.

So, the struggle continues and we'll keep our fingers crossed for a return to more temperate, paint-friendly weather.