Monday, September 24, 2007

Changes in the Budget

I mentioned back in June that our house needed new siding. We knew it needed a new deck as well as our current deck is, uh, dangerous. It isn't bolted to the house, it was made of wood full of knots, and it has all kinds of weird angles. There are places where it is scary to walk.

We've finally gotten around to getting a contractor with an amazing reputation, whose work we see each day as he built the house 2 doors down from us. The owners still rave about him as he did the repair work necessary two years ago when the house next door to them (3 doors from us) burned down and also caught their house ablaze. He builds very nice places for physicians who work on the economy. So we asked him to do our house.

He presented his proposal tonight. We had no idea how expensive this would be.

It will be very nice, granted. The house will look totally different.

But we will be broke!

We had planned to get rid of our Wal-Mart furniture and buy new. That has to wait.

The thing is, this has to be done. There is no choice for either. Even if we decided to sell instead of do this work, any home inspector would ding us on the siding and the deck and we'd have to give the house away.

And we want it done correctly. The siding we are getting is almost maintenance free, so that will save us on upkeep. The present deck wood is yellow pine; we are getting it rebuilt with redwood. You pay for quality.

Yeah, we could get a bunch more estimates, but we've been working this for six weeks. We need to do this sooner rather than later. The clincher is the guy lives around the corner from us, so he has to be honest in his dealings. We've heard nothing that would suggest otherwise. In his estimate, he brought a material price list from a store we use and trust. He has been nothing but upfront in his dealings, and everyone we've spoken with who have used him loves him.

Gulp! Here we go!

1 comment:

Cathy said...

Better to go with the known --- as we did. We know we could have gotten a cheaper price, but we wanted to go with someone we trusted and everyone that uses him feels the same. Gives you a sense of peace.