Wednesday - May 07, 2008

oh such fun

I live in a condo park. The place was built 30 or more years ago. The geniuses who designed the place sided the whole complex, all 33 buildings, with the cheapest rough milled wood lath they could find. Then they hung it vertically, so that the edges would catch all the wind and rain. Needless to say, many folks here have had water leakage problems. It wasn’t until two years ago that any of these units even had gutters. Because they aren’t pretty. A big bunch of brain surgeons, right? So we got gutters finally, but they fired the guy who ran that project because he put in industrial size gutters, which are nearly double the size of your standard homeowner size. But they do a great job, and should have lastest for decades.

Well, they’re mostly gone now. The condo association decided to reside the whole place in modern insulated vinyl, and replace the brand-new gutters with smaller ones that “are more aesthetic”. Fuck that, they worked. So now they’re being sold for scrap. So right now we have even more Nicaraguans running around here than usual, tearing the place apart with saws and hammers. Fun, fun, and more fun.

It’s just extra special that they started the time exactly when the carpenter bees swarm. As luck would have it, our building is the first one to get the treatment. We’re getting all the wood siding torn off, replacement plywood undersheathing where necessary, a fully taped Tyvek wrap, and Alcoa Structure EPS siding on top. Top of the line stuff. Cost per unit: $10,000. Youch. And we got a brand new roof last year. Gosh, if I could get the landlord to paint and put in new carpet, that would be awesome ... except the rent would shoot up so much we’d have to move. We might anyway ... I figure the rent is going up $100 per month to pay for this, and it’s a falling renters market around here.

Posted by Drew458     on 05/07/2008 at 06:41 PM   
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