House nearly finished

The house renovations are nearly finished. They finished the siding on Thursday, put on doors on Friday, and the last piece will be the new garage door on Monday. It's kind of astonishing to me what a difference it all makes. I expect I'll be astonished by the increase in our taxes as well. It's fun to come and see a pretty little house, and not a terrible wreck. It makes being outside more pleasant too. And it isn't so much just the appearance as being able to see it without having to worry about whether the deferred maintenance was causing more serious problems and stressing about how we were ever going to get it all fixed. For better or worse, it's done now -- and it sure feels better. Read more to see the before-and-after pictures.

The new storm doors are top-of-the-line and have a good seal. Our exterior doors are rather old and don't seal well, so its important to have the storm doors. These also have an integrated screen, so you just slid down the upper window and a screen unrolls down from the top. There are two big advantages in that: one is that you can easily take advantage of nice weather by opening the screen and then close it again if the weather gets bad. You also don't have to store the glass panes someplace and risk breaking them either in storage or installing/uninstalling. We broke one of the old ones that way.

The difference before and after is really striking. The new siding gives the house a real glow and polish. I'm sorry to lose the wood siding in some ways -- cedar weathers extremely well, but some of the siding had been replaced with cheap pine and the whole thing had a bunch of paint slapped over it at some point. Getting all the wood covered with vinyl will make the exterior nearly maintenance free and will save a lot of money in the long run. Plus, all of these materials require oil to produce and buying them now makes a lot of sense to me, as I see oil getting more and more expensive. So buying the materials now is likely cheaper than it will be in the future. And you can click on any of the pictures in the blog and it should take you to flickr where you can see the larger versions -- I left the versions full size, so you can blow them up and see a lot of detail. Enjoy!