The Teal One

The last couple of weeks have been incredibly busy for us and I have neglected a good part of what I usually do around the house.  I got sick twice (thank you very much, fibromyalgia) and we went with Brian's family on a trip to the beach so now that we are home and I am feeling a bit better today, I began to notice everything that has to be done.  Hence today, after church, when we were coming into our house this afternoon I saw how bad the siding is by our front door.

 I love our house but the siding has been a source of stress for us; it is really shoddy and basically rotting all over even though it isn't that old.  We really wish we could have a contractor replace it all with some new fiber cement board but that runs about $12,000. This is about 99% more than we have in our house repairs fund since we just had to replace our air conditioning unit.  Oh, the joys of home ownership.  Our alternative to replacing it all at once is for Brian and me to do it ourselves one section at a time. 

So, when I saw how bad the siding looked, I decided to inspect it to see how rotten it is and if this is going to be the section we start with.  I started pushing on it to see how soft it was...

Ooooops...  My finger went right through it thus in my attempt to figure out how much damage there is, I inadvertently created more damage.  And yes, that is an accurate representation of how teal my house is.

I think that because Brian is an architect, I tend to feel somewhat empowered when it comes home maintenance.  He knows very well how stuff is put together and how to fix it.  I have absorbed a lot of information over the years from him and now it seems that this has created a sense of overconfidence hence the hole in the siding.  We will see how this plays out as we attempt to fix it ourselves or rather, Brian fixes it and I attempt to help.

As silly as it sounds, my main reason for wanting to do all the siding at once was so that we could repaint the house (hopefully the photo explains my intense desire to do this).  It is an enormous amount of teal!  It had just been painted when we bought it a few years ago and so repainting would have just been vanity.   I had hoped for a nice, really light creamy green-gray color but it looks like it will be staying teal.  I am pretty sure that the association would frown upon painting individual sections of it my desired color while the rest of it remains teal over the weeks and months we replace the siding.  I also came to realize that God has provided an amazing house for us to live in and it is really demanding of me to insist that it should be a different color when it is really expensive to change it and there are so many better uses for that money, even if I had it to spend on this.  That being said, the color has definitely grown on me since I first exclaimed, "The TEAL one!" when Brian told me that he had found the house we were going to buy and it does fit in well with our neighborhood.  The biggest benefit, though, is when I am giving directions to people coming over for the first time.  Nobody has ever missed the "teal house on the right"!