It scratches my eyes

We have a contractor that we occasionally use who is from Romania which means his use of the English language is occasionally creative. Once when at the house he looked at a little bump out repair and proclaimed, "it scratches my eyes, it has to go!" Needless to say this comment - 'it scratches my eyes' quickly entered the Smit lexicon to describe something that just doesn't look right - or just isn't right.

This year has been for us the year of the exterior of the house - new privacy screen on the deck, new railing on the deck, new front stoop and railing, new driveway, work in the garden, stucco repair and finally this week the house gets painted. In preparation, I have been, the last two days, repairing the siding on the house. two old dryer ducts had to go - that sort of thing. Fortunately when we installed french doors a couple of years ago, I saved some scraps of siding from the new opening and was able to glue them over the existing siding to camouflage the holes.

That said on one side we had had a guy repair some spots with aluminum when they did our soffit and eaves (not my Romanian guy!). The colour didn't match but, we are getting the house painted, so, no big deal.

Hence tonights rant, the aluminum repairs had scratched my eyes every time I looked at them - and not just because they were a different colour. I tried my hardest to leave them be - knowing that the house is 80 years old and never going to be perfect. Well, I finally couldn't bear it, pulled off the patches only to find that every single one (four) had been done wrong. One was the wrong size ( a corner piece that had to match the line) and the other three, he hadn't bothered to level out the repair underneath so, none of the ever could lay flat or straight. So, four for four with proper repairs now - and me wondering while there's always time to do it again but never time to do it right the first time.

Argh! rant over

Oh, and, I bought a blade for my chop saw for aluminum - for the railings, and for the siding. The arrows for rotation were in the wrong direction - weird.

This is a timely post.... For years I have suffered with the extremely poor job that the subcontractor did installing the stucco on my house. I've spent most of the summer pulling out the bad (cracked) sections on the walls and reinstalling new mortar then painting with a sealing paint. I just finished the last wall in front of the house yesterday!
Some pics....

Oh by the way JP it appears that you bought the wrong blade for your chop saw.... since the rotation is wrong if you read the fine print it will tell you "for use in the southern hemisphere" :rolleye:

wall looks so much better, and in the second pair, good on you for levelling up the house as well!

It is interesting with this house, it was significantly restored in the few years before we bought it - it was not DIY - and what was done well was done really well and what was done poorly was done really poorly - I can only conclude that the previous owners really didn't know the difference between good work and bad. So, the stucco repairs were largely because when they did the stucco, they just cut the foam around the ends of the gutters and the roof flashing. When we got new eavestroughs, removing the old left gaping holes. And any stucco guy who gave us an estimate just left shaking his head at the work.

got the holes in the siding (mostly nail holes) caulked up and basically ready to go. now just pick the colours and sit back.

In terms of the blade - you might be right. Bizarrely (I will have to remember to take a picture) it says, may cause cancer - and birth defects. The birth defects I sort of get - if I stand too close to the blade, :0 but, cancer? (and yes I know it means sawdust ;p )

Don't know about Birth defects by standing too close to the blade... to me it's more like Birth CONTROL.

Gliderman8 said:

Don't know about Birth defects by standing too close to the blade... to me it's more like Birth CONTROL.

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Indeed. :thumbsup:

I'm Trustee under a Will. The trust corpus is a 2-store commercial building housing a liquor store and a pet food store. Our insurance company has ordered us to repair several things including the gravel/aggregate stucco on the front of the building or they will cancel our insurance. Handymen won't touch the project and so far, I have two estimates - $36K and $2,700.00. This is crazy. Any ideas?

pdplot said:

I'm Trustee under a Will. The trust corpus is a 2-store commercial building housing a liquor store and a pet food store. Our insurance company has ordered us to repair several things including the gravel/aggregate stucco on the front of the building or they will cancel our insurance. Handymen won't touch the project and so far, I have two estimates - $36K and $2,700.00. This is crazy. Any ideas?

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crazy indeed - our estimates weren't that far apart but, for 2 at least the next quote was 100% higher than the one we accepted.

two thoughts.

1. If the purpose is just to get the place buttoned up for insurance purposes go cheap and git er done. (we have spent the entire summer explaining to contractors that we are moving in about 5 years so we don't need a 30 year solution to a 5 year problem)

2. What made a huge difference for us was these websites where you submit the project and contractors submit bids. (In Canada it is Homestars - there is a USA one they advertize on HGTV but the name escapes me) you post the project and you get contacted. Might be worth a go to get an idea of which bid is realistic.

I will also say that there seems to be no relationship between what things cost and what I think they should cost. Driveway was less than I expected, stoop about what I expected. Stucco was higher than I expected (and they were done in about 4 hours after telling me 2 days) and installing the railing and glass on the stoop took 2 1/2 days and was less than 1/2 of the stucco - go figure.

The biggest problem I had was getting contractors to return calls and the two contractors that came to look at the job never returned with a quote. I understand that they want the big projects but all they need to do is submit a high price and if accepted then I have to assume they are making a good profit on a small project.

I'm cheap and come from, on my mother's side, a contracting family so I wind up doing most work myself. My house is sturdy but not always the most pleasant looking.

Gliderman8 said:

The biggest problem I had was getting contractors to return calls and the two contractors that came to look at the job never returned with a quote. I understand that they want the big projects but all they need to do is submit a high price and if accepted then I have to assume they are making a good profit on a small project.

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we couldn't get any one to return our calls - till we started using this online thing. Not 100% happy but much happier and you can read reviews.

JPSmit said:

........Not 100% happy but much happier and you can read reviews.

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If you can believe them.

When I needed to have the electric line coming into the house replaced last October due to a fault in the 50 yo original I got very little interest from local companies. One who advertized in the phone book as no job too big or small, told me they weren't interested in one day jobs. And another told me it would be probably 6 months if they decided they wanted the job, whicj I took to be a variation on the W.C Fields "go away kid, ya bother me". tried about a dozen different local places before I found one willing to come handle it.