Can’t Someone Else Do It?

It’s been a couple of months since my last post. Sometimes work is diligently continuing even as I don’t update the blog, but in this case, not much has changed. We still don’t have a new roof. We still don’t have siding. We do, however, have a new plan. Whether or not we can bring that plan about and how long it will take, is a separate question.

When we started looking at siding, we got a few quotes. With the two inches of exterior rigid foam, we wound up choosing Hardie board, a cement fiber clapboard siding. I spent a lot of time reviewing other options, but there are a lot of products that will not warranty an installation over more than an inch of foam. In the case of Hardie Board, we’ll need to put up furring strips over the foam that are screwed through the foam and cladding into structure.

When we did the research on siding, we found that there was a big range when it came to cost, so we weren’t sure what to expect in terms of quotes. Without exception, the quotes came back at the top of the range. That means that siding is turning out to be a very big ticket item. So big, in fact, that paying for it out of pocket isn’t really feasible, and getting a loan or floating it on credit cards would put us in the position of paying it back over perhaps three years.

The problem with that is we are tired of living in the basement. It’s been two-and-a-half years already (time flies) and we’d really like to live in our house. If we take out a loan that we have to pay off for even a couple years, it means we aren’t taking out the loan to finish the house until that’s paid off, and that is a very unappealing idea at this point.

What we’re left with is putting the siding into the same loan that we need to get to finish the house. One option is to forestall siding until we’ve finished all of the remaining projects left before we take out the loan, which mostly includes re-framing the second floor and attic: subfloor, walls, and stairs. It’s hard to accurately estimate how long all that would take, but given the rate things have been going, I’d guess it would take another year.

The other option, and the one we’ve decided to go with, is taking out the loan now, and letting professionals finish the job. We’ve been working on this house for seven and a half years now. We’ve put in an awful lot of sweat equity, and we’re ready to have a house that we can live in. The kids are ready to have their own bedrooms.

With that decision reached, we’ve been working with contractors to put together proposals, working with banks on loans, and working with an architect to revise our plans to match what we actually built and what we’re actually building, given some of the necessary and elected drift that’s taken place in the last several years since we got our original prints.

This wasn’t an easy decision for us to reach, and we’re faced with all the same concerns (and experience) we’ve had with contractors up to this point, but we simply don’t have the free time needed to get the house done ourselves the way we want it done in a reasonable amount of time. We’ll still have to finish the basement ourselves, since we’re living in it,
and probably some of the back yard work like the patio and pergola, but the rest of it we’ll get done in one fell swoop.

More to come. Even with this change in direction, we will continue to chronicle the progress in the blog and perhaps (perhaps!) the end is actually in sight.