When the year began, we had earmarked some items that needed to be fixed around the house. That was before the nasty mushroom infestation triggered us on the home improvement wild ride that's finally beginning to wind down. This week, we finally got around to one of the items on our original list: The wood fascia around our house had dry rot. The poria expert had originally thought the rot was a sign that the nasty fungus in our soil had made its way into the walls (hence his original estimate of as much as $40,000 to fix). Fortunately, the fungus never got past our floor and the post that was holding up some of our kitchen cabinets. |
The dry rot was due to a leaky roof.
Finding out that you need to replace your roof is never welcome news -- but at least, it's in the realm of normal maintenance (compared with finding wood-eating mushrooms in your cabinets). And it wasn't exactly unexpected. So while I would rather focus on one home improvement project at a time, we thought it important to get this taken care of before the rainy season.
As much as I've complained about having our house turned upside down these last five months, I do feel fortunate to have worked with some really great contractors. Thank goodness we have friends who have been there before us (well, they've been to the land of kitchen remodels and roofing -- we were on our own with the poria).
We interviewed three roofing contractors in August, and weren't really happy with any of them. Then, I casually mentioned it to a friend who told us we HAD to call her guy, Jim. I'm so glad we did. Jim's estimate was a little bit higher than the others, but he had anticipated all the little extras we would likely need and factored it into the price. The other contractors left that as a big question mark.
"I don't like surprises, and I don't think my customers do, either," he explained.
I especially liked him because the very first thing he did was show me shingle options that save energy. None of the other contractors did that. That's how we ended up selecting Energy Star-rated white shingles, which reflect light, reduce energy costs -- and may make us eligible for a tax rebate. WIN-WIN-WIN.
"Is it going to look weird?" my husband wondered.
Maybe. But Jim told us that in 2010, California is going to require reflective shingles on all new roofs built in the state. There are dark colored shingles that are engineered to reflect light, but they cost twice as much. I predict that white will soon be a very popular color for roofs in SoCal - which kind of puts us in the vanguard.
Once the roof was off, Jim was surprised to see that we had NO insulation up there. Of course, I knew that already. Our house gets HOT in the summer, and we have the air conditioning bills to prove it.
This was an opportunity to do something about that -- which added $2000 and a couple of extra days to the project.
But we're going to save lots of money on our energy bills, right?
To offset all that white on top, we had Jim's crew paint the fascia trim a sprightly shade of green. The next improvement to the exterior of the house will be new siding, which will be in a complementary color.
I only hope we make it that far. It's nice to see progress made on the house, and we're ready to just get it done. I can enjoy it as long as I don't think about the cost -- but the minute we get the bill, I freak out a little. It's not fun to watch your bank balance shrink, even when you're using it for something you really need (like a roof over your head).
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