When it comes to house projects, things that seem to be straightforward have a knack for turning into something more difficult. I’m a smart guy, but sheesh, simple five-minute wiring jobs become hour-long exercises in frustration. Replacement parts don’t fit like they should. There isn’t quite enough paint. I don’t have the right tool. The list goes on. At this point I often start a job with the expectation that it’ll take longer than I’d like, and be harder than I think.
Take the hot tub as the latest example. It’s nineteen years old, and I don’t think the former owners did a lot of maintenance on it. Before using it for the first time, I had to replace some parts and do an overall tune-up. But hey, eventually it worked, and it’s been pretty solid ever since. Well, the paint has been chipping for a while, and I figured a little touch-up would be in order. I picked out a nice grey color and sat down to paint the sides. Of course, painting over chipped paint is a terrible idea– the new paint will just flake off with the old. With a heavy sigh, I started scraping off the old. It was then I realized the old siding– which is a pretty nice redwood– was rotting and falling apart. In all fairness, sixteen years without maintenance will do that.
A bit of online research led me to a hot tub supplier who sells the siding for this ancient model. But the cost is just shy of $600. Per side. No thanks. We headed to Lowe’s and picked out some siding, then cut it to size.
The paint soaked right in, and it was a quick job to get these new sides looking good.
Next step: remove all the old siding. Some of it was so rotten it crumbled. Yikes. Definitely a good call to replace it!
We installed the new pieces, dismayed to find the cuts were off by about an eighth of an inch on every side. Pepper used a hand file (yes, a hand file) to shave off that eighth-inch on each one while I positioned and screwed in the boards.
Back to my introduction: a project that I’d originally expected to take maybe an hour ended up taking five, including a trip to Kalispell for the wood. The good news, however, is that it looks really sharp now.
All’s well that ends well, they say, but wow, just one of these times I’d like a house project to go to plan…