Got a can opener?

Oh wait, we don't need one, because we are one!

We had two ways to deal with the termite damage and wood rot, either spot patch all the messed up spots or replace everything. Of course replacing everything is the pricier option, but the more we inspected the house, the more problem spots we found. It wasn't just limited to termite damage, a lot of the damage was due to wood rot. There were many spots on the house where the wood was literally a sponge. When you press down on the wood, not only would the wood succumb to your touch, but water would appear. I'm telling you, just like a sponge. Wood is supposed to be hard, duh, and make a nice solid sound when you knock on it. That saying, "Knock on wood," probably came from someone who had a lot of wet, soggy, water damaged wood. You knock on it hoping that it you'll hurt your knuckles instead of splashing up water. With all the rot and wet wood, it just made more sense to us to replace the siding. Given the condition of the house and the insight and advice of the contractors as well as B's cousin-in-law Gui (Hi Gui!), we decided to replace two and a half sides of the house.

Instead of replacing the original redwood with redwood, we decided to use hardiboard, also known as hardiplank, a fiber cement composite siding. We chose hardiplank instead of wood because it's cheaper than wood and most importantly it's termite resistant.



There are two ways hardiplank can be installed. The first method is to strip the old siding, replace it with plywood and then tyvek it. The second method is to replace only the damaged areas with plywood and tyvek over the patched areas and old siding eliminating the need to strip everything. The first method is more risky in that once you open up the walls, you open your wallet up to repairing all the damage that may be lurking there (Most estimates for siding replacement are only based on replacing the siding and not fixing any damage behind the walls. The additional work required to fix the damage was quoted for us as an hourly rate plus materials). If you side over the top of the old siding, you assume that everything behind the walls are all fine and dandy. Fine and dandy wasn't an assumption that we felt comfortable making.



Like most of you, we don't have a bottomless wallet, didn't win the lottery or have any filthy rich relatives. So why open up ourselves to spending more than we budgeted? The one thing that Benito and I both believe in is, "Do it once and do it right." If we sided over top of the old siding and we were to discover any structural issues in the future, we would have to rip off the new siding and old siding to make repairs. If we opened it up, we would discover the problems first, correct them and not have to worry about them down the line. And when the time comes around for us to put this house back on the market, we didn't want to be liable for any issues that we could have corrected the first time around. Call us crazy, but spending the money to have peace of mind was worth it to us.


This house was brought to you by Tyvek

And in the end, even though it was sad for us to see good wood in the dumpster pile, it didn't compare to the sinking feeling we'd get every time our contractor called us to inform us of new damage he'd find. Some days it was termite tracks.


Yes, those tiny, little things did that to the wood.
Pretty amazing if you think about it. But we still hate them.

Some days it was wet, rotten wood.



And some days it was both.



And on the last day, we were happy and satisfied because we got one step closer to a moving in.