I never pretend that our house is a perfect place, inside or out. There are usually toys all over the floor, a thin layer of dust on nearly everything, and an ever-growing list of repairs and improvements to be made. We’ve lived here for about three and a half years, and while the house was completely livable, I’ve slowly discovered there were many points of deferred maintenance, mostly on the exterior.
I’ve been tackling them one by one (like the front door and the porch), but some things are beyond my capabilities. Thus they have not been dealt with yet and continue to be embarrassing and ugly.
The upstairs dormers are covered in roof shingling. Very simply, this is not the right material for vertical surfaces such as these. Not only does it look cheap, the shingles don’t necessarily hold up to the weather as they do on roofs and they are starting to peel off one by one.
There’s also this crazy boarded up window on the other dormer that I honestly did not notice until we were already living in the house.
And we have a minor leak near the ceiling in the living room that seems to be getting worse. This was disguised when we bought the house because there was a giant plate glass mirror over the mantel. It’s not dripping water into the room, and it’s not wet to the touch. The plaster is soaking all of it up and slowly bulging out. It’s a growing problem, literally.
We’ve had some recurring minor animal invasions due to cracks and crevices in our soffiting and fascia. There are currently two bird nests underneath the soffit, possibly more. Nothing has gotten into the living areas of the house, but I’ve heard birds and other (larger) creatures in our ceilings from time to time.
Just a few weeks ago, what I suspect was a squirrel was making a ruckus in the kitchen ceiling. When I knocked on the ceiling, it knocked back. No lie.
I’m so done with wondering when the next animal will show up and worrying about whether it might actually get into the living space or cause real damage.
So why am I showing you all of this?
We are finally taking care of all of it.
We got a handful of estimates from companies that do everything (gutters, siding, soffiting, roofing). This is not going to be cheap (like, the price of a new car… yeesh!). But all these smaller problems are adding up to be a big problem. We plan to be in this house for a while, so we need to take care of it.
Although it’s a large upfront cost, it makes sense to us to have it all done by one company all at once instead of piecemeal. (In the event of a problem, I don’t want company A who did the roof blaming company B who did the gutters.) All of these things sort of go together. Plus we got a little bit of a multi-project discount.
So that’s the big news around these parts. More details and color selections in another post soon!
I just found your blog. I live in Lansdowne, too! I think it’s brilliant that you got an all-in-one company to do your exterior repairs, because I’m sure that separate companies play that blame game all the time.
Thanks!
As it turns out, the big local company had what I suspect were smaller company sub-contractors do the work. Of course, the larger company is on the hook for any problems that might arise, but the little guys do still get the work!