Our house is a hard-working lady. She is from 1906, and let me tell you, sort of shows her age.
When we first moved in here, the house looked like this:
Then we replaced the door, ripped out the single-pane broken windows, tore off the LP siding and it looked like this:
Next, we had hardie plank put up (6 inch, 2 inch lap, smooth!), and it looked like this:
Finally, we had it painted purple. Fabulous Grape actually. It looked like this:
Now any normal person would say, “Hey, you might want to INSULATE THE WALLS while you are at all that ripping apart and doing over.” Maybe someone did say that. Did we listen? Oh no. We are just now having insulation blown into tiny little holes that very dedicated and frustrated men are drilling on the outside of our house. They actually aren’t frustrated with the drilling; they are frustrated trying to pry up planks of hardie plank without breaking it. The stuff is like flint: tough from the outside but liable to snap into shards of… I don’t know, what is this crap made of…cement? Anyway, it doesn’t bend well which means that it definitely doesn’t “pry” well. It is a laborious job and they have to treat our stupid siding with kid gloves.
Why didn’t we do this earlier? We wanted to “save money”. Ha! I’ll write a check to that one! If I actually saved money all the times that I tried to save money, I would not be spending so much money wishing I hadn’t tried to save money! (Unravel that one for me please.)
In other news, the attic insulation is done, the new furnace is in, the wall insulation should finish up in a couple days, and I am feeling WARMER! It is an interesting sensation because it is not so much that I am warm as that I am not noticing being cold. Unfortunately, I also feel like I can not get enough fresh air, like I am oxygen deprived. I have often felt this way in hotels and places with newer construction. I think I am not accustomed to all the drafts being sealed up. I am sure I will get used to this in a couple days. I feel like someone really needs to open a window around here!
I’ll put up pictures in the next couple days of what our house looks like now. It looks like…. someone attacked it and ripped boards off it here and there. Poor old lady.
5 Comments, Comment or Ping
OH, poor house! I’m glad that you will be, if not warmer, then not as noticeably cold. It’s funny but I completely understand.
And in your defense, it is hard to think about insulation when it is nice and gorgeous and sunny in an Oregon summer!
January 28th, 2010
Those old pictures of the in-between stages make me want to weep. I am really looking forward to being done with tearing off the outside of our house every few years.
January 28th, 2010
Hey, we have an 1906 old house too… it isn’t nearly as nice as yours though. Someday we will have the funds to give it a complete makeover. Someone gave it a big makeover in the 60′s it looks like and it’s missing all the cool stuff like door molding from that era. There are a lot of things, like the door molding, that looks like 60′s style stuff. I had to double check the age of the house when we were thinking of buying it because it looked like it was a 1960 house, not a 1906. I thought it was a typo at first.
January 28th, 2010
HA! I hear you on the molding. We have been slowly pulling off the crap from the 80s around here. First the hollow core doors went, then the ugly molding. It is hard though as the correct style will run you about $80 a FOOT. Really. Painful. My dad grabbed a chisel and made a chunk for me because I couldn’t handle paying $400 for a short run of molding that I needed.
January 28th, 2010
“If I actually saved money all the times that I tried to save money, I would not be spending so much money wishing I hadn’t tried to save money!”
I think that all.the.time. And yet, my miserly habits remain the same.
February 4th, 2010
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