Siding! Renovation! Gutulousness!

First, a new cat picture. This is, of course, Notamus. He is exhausted after his under-the-house adventures.

It's hard to get pictures of Flashes, because he's rarely this lazy. I have a number of great pictures of Flashes' butt, the corner of one ear, or a totally blank frame, because he's always moving at high speed.

Next, the new sill plate and patch work on the house. You can kind of see why I need new siding.

Aaaaand new windows. Look up there, in the corner of this window. That's a plant. No, it's not growing from the inside of the room. It's taken root in the rotting wood of the window and is sending shoots out into the inside of the window.

A lovely "before" shot of the front of the house. Note the cruddy gray Masonite siding, the bad paint-matching near the front door, and the white Dutch lap siding that was covered up until a couple of days ago. The original siding (the white stuff) is at least a half-inch thick and is solid wood. If I had a million dollars and unlimited time, I would get it scraped and painted and say to hell with vinyl. 

If you look just above the date stamp, where the bloom of the butterfly bush is pointing, you can see where the siding is beginning to pull away from the wall in a big wavy area. This is the east side of the house, where things were in pretty good shape--the north side was losing siding at a shocking rate. I could grab pieces of it and just crumble it in my hand.

And isn't that a nice half-assed patch job on the front stoop? The concrete shifted after a hundred-year flood a few years ago, and there's nothing anybody can do to shift it back. It's kind of obvious that there's a large crack in the concrete, but what the hell--nobody wearing stilettos will ever be able to ring my doorbell.

The new siding is mostly on the front of the house now, though there are a few spots where it's not *quite* done. I anticipate it'll all be finished by Thursday. Huzzah! I'm hoping against hope that new windows and doors can go in late this week or early next. The dust is beginning to bug me.

In the meantime, the nice man from the lumberyard delivered sixteen tons of dimensional lumber and Dek-Blocks and decomposed granite et cetera yesterday. If it doesn't rain buckets today and tomorrow, I plan to make at least a good start on a deck in the back yard. Pictures, of course, will be forthcoming.

The siding job has gone remarkably smoothly. Honestly? I think you get what you pay for, at least to a certain extent, with stuff like this. The company I went with was slightly more expensive than the others, but the project manager has been by a couple of times and has called to make sure it's all going well. The workers themselves, while scary-looking, have turned out to be really nice, really careful craftsmen. The only hang-up so far has been a permitting issue with the city, which takes a minimum of five days to do *anything*, including answer the phone.

It's nice to come home from work and see what they've done during the day. Makes me feel like I've got a real house now, rather than a mungy little dump.

I suppose this means I'll have to start mowing the grass and, you know, actually *cleaning*.