The Contractor Goes To Work

The worst thing about this job was that it had to be done in late December, early January. The guys from AGW Contracting didn't seem to mind though, as they jumped right in.

I did the roof tear off and clean up myself, with a few friends. It took us two days to strip it down. It took me another few days to get the yard cleaned up decently, but it had to be cleaned again once the snow finally melted in Spring. It only took two days for the new roof to be put on.

You'll note that I had a few windows added to the home that weren't originally there. For some reason, the ends of the house had no windows; that made it feel a bit like a cave at times. I added one window to each room that had a wall on the end of the house. That amounted to three windows on the North side, and two on the South side. This was something that I knew I wanted to do, and now was definitely the best time for it. Since all the siding was going to be ripped off anyways, it worked out.

I also had the patio doors added to the dining room, where there was a large window. I knew that I wanted to extend the deck down the whole length of the house at some point, so the doors would be really nice there. I added a light there myself, while the contractors had things ripped apart.

It really sucked having the windows and doors removed from the house this time of the year. You can imagine that there were some rather drafty days, as the weather is frequently negative degrees Farenheit around then.

When the original siding was removed from the home, it was discovered that there was no wall sheathing in place. A typical new home in this area will have exterior OSB wall sheathing. This house had 4 inch metal straps running diagonally at the corners. This was very unfortunate. I ended up having the contractor add the OSB sheathing, and eating the cost.

When the contractors were working with the new siding, they had to take over the garage. They needed a place to warm it up, so that it wasn't frozen and brittle. They ran a few commercial sized space heaters in the garage for a few weeks there, but were able to get the job done well.

My original intention was to have all the brick on the house removed. The brick removal went well on the lower ground level, where there was just a 3 foot high pony wall. On the upper ground level though, it didn't go so smooth. The brick covered the whole front wall of the house there. Because of how much work it was, and because of how much waste was being created; I had the contractors stop removing the brick at about 4 feet from the ground. It stopped even with the bottom of the big bay window.

Because of how the brick was tied in with the roof line above the front door, I also had them leave that brick in place. It would have caused many problems to try to remove it. In the end, it worked out really well that we left all this on there.

You can see all the windows and doors being replaced in the pictures as the contractors worked their way around the house. These new windows and doors, combined with the wall sheathing, house wrap, and the new furnace dropped the heating costs in the house nearly $150 per month during the coldest months of winter!

Lastly, here's a pic of the new furnace. It's literally 1/3 the size of the original. You can see a pic of the old furnace in the last blog post. I bought the most efficient furnace I could get. It cost $4,000, installed.

That was everything that my main contractor did for me. $33,966.67 later, they were done.