As I stand back at look up at the house I have to remind myself that this is progress. All the overgrown shrubbery and ivy has been pulled out, the railroad ties are gone and the dead trees have been cut down. Almost all of the cedar shake siding has been removed. The decks have been torn down. The rented dumpster in the driveway is almost full. The house looks... abandoned.
My son Joe is a carpenter by trade and he offered to work for us in between his regular jobs. I am going to be his assistant. Ray works long hours and he'd rather pay someone else to do the work than to have to come home and do it himself. That's OK. It will get done faster this way.
Joe took out the two windows in the front of the house that face the street. We ordered two new ones from the siding company. The window over the driveway will be a box window and the living room window will be a 9 foot bay window with casements. Joe's going to take out all of the rest of the windows tomorrow and replace them with ones we ordered from Home Depot. He said the best time to replace the windows was before they were capped by the siding company. Makes sense... but when we started this project we only talked about replacing the decks. There's so much indoor work that I wanted to get to. Now... we ended up removing all the shrubbery, wood ties, and replacing the windows and siding. Then we'll have to put in a new retainer wall and do some major landscaping. I guess we'll have to replace the outside lights... the old ones won't look right next to the new siding. And I'll have to get window treatments for the two new windows. They are so big I'm sure they'll have to be custom made.
When I was reading the Sunday paper this morning I couldn't help but flip through the Real Estate section. Is it too late to pack up and move?
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