The Re-siding of 1101 Fulton Ave.
If you live on the west coast, one of the things you find out about pretty quickly is dry rot.  I had not encountered dry rot before, at least not to my knowledge, but you get it when wood gets wet, dries out, gets wet, dries out, etc.  If you live in a part of the country that gets alot of rain like we do, you get dry rot. 

When I repainted the house in 2002, I found dry rot along the skirting of the house.  Manufactured homes don't have a true foundation.  They sit on stacks of cinder blocks, but what appears to be foundation is really only three tiers of blocks built in a wall around the house.  The house doesn't sit on the foundation - it is false.  To close the gap between the wall of blocks and the house, they nail on boards that are considered skirting.  The boards they used on our house were pressed wood, not sealed on the ends and they soaked up water and then rotted.  I tried to seal them with shellac when I repainted, but rot is insidious.  We had the north side skirting replaced last year and knew that eventually we would have to do something more dramatic. 

So we started talking about siding.  The two kinds used in this area that are better than wood are cement or vinyl.  New manufactured homes are now made with cement sheeting.  It looks good, but it is expensive.  We did some reading and found out that vinyl siding has improved over recent years. The color is better and it is cheaper than cement.  We also talked about doing the work now so we can enjoy it versus waiting as long as we possibly could and having it done only to sell a few years after.  That seemed like putting covers on new car seats - the next owner gets to enjoy it, but you don't.  So we decided to go ahead and do it now so we can enjoy it.  

Sears sent us a postcard offering a free estimate and the rest, as they say, is history.  Within a week of sending in the postcard we were getting calls to schedule an estimate.  The man that came and did the estimate had his presentation down.  But what he said also made alot of sense.  By having Sears do it, we wouldn't have to deal with different entities like the contractor, supplier and manufacturer.  The "buck" would start and stop with Sears.  We opted for their best siding - rated to withstand a category 4 hurricane and having a transferrable warranty - for the benefit of the next owners - 20 or 25 years from now.  

We thought it would take 4-6 weeks until we heard something about a start date, but in a little over a week we had a call that there was a crew available and they would like to start - in two days!  Whoa!!!

So Bill, Charlie and Adam arrived from somewhere in Washington state on November 8th and took up residence at a motel in Coos Bay.  They actually started work on the 9th of November and finished on the 18th.  They ran into a few nice days, but more typically it was overcast and rainy.  We also had a couple of days with high winds which cut their day short.  They originally thought it would take 5 days, but they ran into more rotten wood then any of us anticipated including three posts in our porch.  We had no idea they were rotting - how lucky for us that we didn't wait another 15 years to do this. 

So here are some before, during and after photos.  We are very, very pleased with the results.  
Before - the house is light gray with blue trim.  The porch has arches and we have a faux vent in our little peaked roof.
After - the siding is a blue gray color - almost like a wedgewood blue.  The trim is white.  We have lost our porch arches, but this will make it lighter and the view from inside the house has improved - no longer cut off by the arches.  We also lost our little decoration on the peak, but we may look for something to hang there.  The trick is hanging anything on this vinyl siding.  
This is the north side of our house.  We had already taken down our fishnet and most of the gulls.  The post by the downspout is one of two at this end that turned out to be rotten.
After - we have our netting up again, but we're not sure about how to hang our gulls so for the time being, we're not.  The numbers for our house are now on the edge in a vertical format.  This used to be where our flag pole was, but now that is on the post - where it can be nailed directly into the wood.  
Here's how it looked when partially finished. Some of our neighbors worried that we were going to have a pink house, but as you can see, that was only temporary.  It is the 3/4 inch insulation under the siding - adding an additional R-4 value.   The rippling on the siding is because I made the photo smaller once I got it on the web page - the siding is not rippled like that.
This is the back side of our house - an eastern exposure.  They had a tight squeeze to install the siding behind the post that the electric meter is on - it's at the far right end of this photo, not really visible.   We have a cat door under the window by the grill.  We used to have a ledge there for the cat but now we'll just put a little stool there.  He can get in or out if he wants to badly enough.
The three guys that did the work were really nice guys.  Bill, the crew boss, has been doing this over 30 years with most of that time for Sears, doing exclusively siding.  He knows how to make a good job even better and he sure did that with our house.  Charlie is probably around Bill's age - hard to tell.  He was a bit camera shy, but Janet loved his wavy hair.  He is a biker and told her he wants to ride down to Baja so she gave him a book she had on the area.  Adam, the youngest of the guys, told me he has been working on siding since he was 12.  He helped his dad initially and now Bill is like a father figure for him. He'll be 20 in January.  It's hard to imagine they have much in the way of home lives when they were here for 9 days solid, but I guess that is what it is like if you are contractors and work out of your home area.  We are really grateful to them - they did a super job and did it with a sense of humor and panache.
In addition to replacing the wood for the skirting and the three rotten posts, they also replaced all the wood the gutters attached to.  It ended up being a much bigger job than any of us realized, but it was all done for the same negotiated price.