Like the little crack in the dyke that turned into a flood, it started with a little thing and turned into a giant thing. I had planned to do a bit of an upgrade to the outside of my house for quite a while, mostly related to the desire to repaint the house. In addition, I had planned to replace my rotting deck before the pandemic until the price of wood skyrocketed, and my patio cover has needed either replacing or stabilizing for quite some time.
A contractor came by my door one day and offered to sand some of the trim boards on my roof (which I would need to do to paint) for a small price, which I agreed to as it was something I was thinking about doing prior to starting painting. It then started evolving. He mentioned that his crew could paint my house, and as I thought about it I decided to spend some money as it was taking me way to long to get to it. As things progressed, he identified some stucco areas that were damaged by moisture that need to be replaced. Then they found that the moisture barrier on the foundation had eroded to nothing and offered to redo that. It continued to grow. By the time it was said and done, the house was painted, the stucco repaired, the moisture barrier reapplied, the deck replaced, the patio cover removed, and the driveway and sidewalk replaced with paver stones. It took them around 3 weeks. I’m happy for the upgrade since this is the first major thing I’ve done to the exterior of the house (which is 70 years old). It’s as massive upgrade. I’m just a bit uneasy about how much I spent, particularly as I didn’t really research it much before I started with this guy. But I guess if I amortize the cost over my time in the house it’s tolerable.
I still have to do a few things to clean up some details that they did a bit sloppy, but overall I’m happy with the improvement. As it’s mostly infrastructure I don’t know to what degree I’ll make my money back if I sell it, but at least it’s in a good state and looks good now.