minorthird

ahhh…the joys of homeownership!

We knew, within reason, what we were getting into when we bought this house. The roof. The siding. The deck. The hardwood floors. The master bedroom.

What did everyone say? “Take it easy. You don’t need to do everything right away.”

Were we listening? No.

But we are now!

We had the Home Depot come out for a siding estimate last night. Now, we were in the market for siding in November, and met with three other companies then, so we figured that this would be a piece of cake. A piece of cake made from a steamy pile of shit, maybe!

$22K! On top of the $13K we’re shelling out to them for the roof.

I think we’ll be making the call today to say we’re not interested at this time.

Sure, we can use a local company to do the siding, but I’ve seen what local guys can do…we live in a neighborhood full of locally-done siding jobs, and let me tell you, I could probably do a better job. At least with Home Depot we would be getting a great labor contract: if anything, ever, goes wrong, our fault or their’s, they fix it for free! But you’ve got to pay the price for that…

It would come out to about $430/month for the next million (or 6) years

We’ve decided that we’re going to use that money towards other projects. Sure, we’ll spend the same amount over time, but if there is a month or two when we want to save it, we can.

So, the next projects on the list:

1. opening the pool — fixing the filter, running power out to the filter, and pouring a concrete slab for the fliter to sit on.
2. fixing the front steps — a $1400 job right there!
3. networking the house
4. patching up the existing shingles, where needed
5. installing a new sliding/french door from the dining room to the deck
6. don’t even get me started on the deck!
7. finishing the master bedroom
8. drinking heavily

This entry was posted on Friday, May 21st, 2004 at 9:43 am and is filed under the joys of homeownership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.