Home Repairs

Our house is slowly falling into a state of disrepair. I assume everyone's house slowly falls into disrepair just like ours, I just don't realize it. It also doesn't help to move into a (then) twenty year old house. At twenty years old most things are in need of replacement. For our house it was siding. We moved in knowing we'd be replacing siding.....we just didn't know ten years later we'd still be doing it. Sean has been doing one side of the house about every four years. We started with the east side. You can't forget that side. It was not pleasant for him. Then we did the south side before putting in the new deck. Now it's the front of the house's turn.

As the years go by the motivation wavers. Could be we're getting older, could be we're lazy homeowners I don't know but neither of us want to do this project. And when I say "us" I mean Sean. I do what I can but this is his project. I paint the siding and hold what I can but he's doing the brunt of the work. Poor guy.

We had to special order the twenty four 4X9 foot sections of siding and they were delivered last week. Now we have the pleasant task of laying them all over the yard and painting the fronts and backs.

About a year ago our lovely dog Sophie was left outside in the fenced in yard while the neighbor was shooting. She goes nuts when this happens. She does everything in her power to get into the house, away from the gunfire. In this instance she jumped up on the bay windows and scraped and clawed until she broke the window. We came home to this and weren't too thrilled to say the least. It didn't break both panes, just the exterior pane. And so it's sat like this for a year. I haven't been too interested in taking the window out and driving around town finding someone to fix it. But with winter coming I felt it was time....plus it's an eye sore. Bugs were starting to go in between the panes and make nests and it looked bad. So Sean took the window out and replaced it with a piece of pink foam insulation.

The kids though this was highly entertaining and pulled up a chair to watch.

I drove to the local Andersen window store with my four and a half foot broken window in the back of my SUV. They told me they don't do that and gave me a phone number to call. I called when I got home and I must admit it was a wonderful experience. They asked if we had an account with them to which I replied no, so they looked up our address and sure enough the former owners were listed. They were able to tell us the windows were installed in 1996 and all I had to do was read off the engraved number in the corner of the window for them to order me a new one. It was manufactured and shipped UPS to our front door. Now that's some customer service!

The installed window is SO clean! Made me realize how dirty the others were.