Getting A Facelift

One of the factors in our push to make sure we got the best financing deal possible and the reason we put our foot down on having to make a 20% down payment was the fact that the house needs work; more than just a little. This is pretty typical in this location. The weather is harsh. If you want a nice house in good condition, it is going to be very expensive and probably quite small. Our house is 1500+ square feet and sits on a double lot. We had to sacrifice nice for size, location and the extra large lot. Fortunately most of our projects will be cosmetic, but not all of them.

When we were inspecting the home before we made the offer, the Realtor mentioned the siding needed looking at. My husband walked up to look at it and put his finger right through it! The siding it came with is called LP siding. Here is a quote from an article that gives you an idea of what we were looking at: "The L-P siding, a concoction of wood scraps and resins, was installed on about 800,000 homes around the country from 1985 to 1995. It warped prematurely, rotted in wet weather and sprouted mushrooms and other fungus. Lawsuits sprouted as well, although L-P contended the problems stemmed mostly from faulty installation. ~Richard B. Schmitt, Wall Street Journal".

Well, the Oregon Coast is about as wet as you can get and from what we know now, faulty installation was a huge part of the problem. Our fist order of business; the siding.

Vinyl siding is obviously usually the cheapest alternative but neither of us were interested in that and after researching it, it's not the best choice for the area. If I were made of money, I would have had the house shingled with cedar but that was the most expensive of all the options I looked into. We ended up deciding on HardiePlank or fiber-cement siding. This siding comes with a 50 year warranty and we also opted for the ColorPlus Technology which means we never have to paint it!

The siding contractor just started the project a couple of days ago and we've run into a few issues already.



There is some dry rot on the corner of the house. At least that's all they found so far....and if you look closely in the window picture, you can see where the LP installer left the old shingles in place, shimmed it out to make a flat surface to install the LP siding and then someone (not sure if it was the same person or not) mounted the new windows over that. So there was a big air/water/critter gap between the two layers of siding. Nice. Now the siding contractor is going to have to re-seat the windows for us so that they will sit flush with the new siding.

We'll continue to post the progress as it unfolds.