The Blanchard Family: Two Big Summer Projects

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Two Big Summer Projects

There were two big projects we had to get done this summer. One was re-siding the north side of our house. If you remember back to this post last fall, we put new, vinyl siding on our house ourselves. Well, a couple weeks after we had finished, we went out to look at in and noticed a ripple on one of the "laps" of our siding, it looked like someone had taken a candle or something hot and drug it along the one lap and melted it. We couldn't figure out what it was. So we kept watching and going out to see if we could figure out what it was. The funny thing was this "melting" kept moving up the side of the house, so as the weeks went on, it wasn't just one lap that was melted it was two, then three, and on and on. Needless to say, we weren't happy. We kept going inside and feeling the wall thinking maybe some wire or something was on fire in the wall, but nothing on the inside ever was hot. We finally went out at the right time and noticed these four beams of light on the side of the house (see photo below). Erik would try and touch it and it was so hot that he couldn't even keep his hand there. So, we assumed that those were the cause of the melting. But where were they coming from? Well, you see, in the fall, as the sun gets lower in the sky, we believe that it was reflecting off of our neighbor's second story window and on to our siding. The lower the sun got, the smaller the angle and thus why it was moving up the side of the wall. As the sun got higher in the sky with spring and then summer, the beams of light disappeared and no melting was occurring. In fact, we haven't even seen them yet this summer/fall. So what do you do? Well, obviously you can't put new vinyl siding up because it would happen again. So we decided to replace it with fiber cement siding...hopefully the sun won't melt cement...we will see in the next couple of months! :) Fiber cement comes in individual pieces that are primed and then you paint it when you are done. The paint is to last the life of the siding. Did I mention when we called the siding company they said that they wouldn't do anything about it and don't guarantee their product against anything that has to do with the sun? Real quality product we've got here... :) Anyways, we are so thankful that we instead had a hail storm and got hail damage on where else, but the north side of our house!! So we were able to get insurance money from the hail storm and use that to replace the siding!! Yay!!! Anyways, here are some photos from project number 1! :)

The beams of light...

The melted siding...

Melted siding all gone!

Cement board going up!

Erik and my AWESOME Uncle Nick who came back to help us fix this side.

All done!! Just needs paint...

Painted and finished!! Can you even tell it's not the same stuff?

Project #2, tearing down the garage!! If you also remember from that house post last fall, the same letter we got from the city telling us we had to scrape and re-paint or re-side our house also said that we had to re-roof and scrape and re-paint or re-side our garage too! Well, our garage was not worth putting the money that it would cost for a new roof and new siding. So, we decided to tear it down and be without garage for right now. We didn't keep a car in there, all we were using for was storage. So we tore it down with the help of our wonderful neighbors, the Nielsen's, and Erik's parents and sister and my brother one Saturday at the end of July. We started at 9:00 am tearing off the siding and anything that was "in the way" inside. They then started swinging at the sides and pushing and by noon, the roof was on our back patio! We took a break for lunch and then after lunch they cut up the roof, cleaned up, hauled everything away, and we were all done by 3:00 that afternoon! Talk about efficient! Then a week or so later we got a metal shed kit and Erik put it together and that's where we are storing the things that were in the garage. The foundation of the garage is in good shape, so we just put the shed up where the garage was. Here are some pictures of the demolition!