Monday, August 25, 2008

exercise in patience

Despite a lack of posts, the garage is progressing nicely. I'm also, of course, busy with my real job.

However, with the help of Marcy, we've:
  • completed the eves venting which looks really nice. The holes have a rounded edge we did with a router. They also serve as trim for the top of the siding. Pictures to follow will explain.
  • foamed and sided the south side where firewood will stack, so we can paint it and get the massive firewood stack out of our driveway finally. The OSB lap siding is much faster to install.
  • I completely finished the roofing which still needed rake trim and a ridge cap. It looks better than the pro job on the house!
  • I put on most of the foundation flashing which covers the foam and makes an attractive termination at the bottom of the walls. This was labor intensive, lots of digging.
Also, a little adventure in patience. I ordered most of the remaining materials for the garage, and discovered that price shopping is always worth it. I order many things from SBS because they are competitive and offer free delivery, and some of the best lumber around.

I almost ordered 90 pieces of siding from them, but $14.79 a piece (with my contractor discount) seemed steep. I called lowes, $13.79. A little better. Plus Home Depot and Lowes promise to beat one another's prices by 10%, so you find the lower price and buy from the other store.

Usually their prices are nearly the same, but Home depot was $10 per piece! So I went to Lowes for 10% off of that, a savings of almost $550! Well worth it.

However, it was such a good deal, they didn't believe me, OR the Home Depot rep when they called. They thought it was a different product and they will only beat the price on an identical one. After working my way up the manager chain, I finally just went and bought one piece from Home depot to prove it was the same thing. This all took about 3 hours, not to mention overloading my trailer with too much weight and too-long boards, which caused scary swaying at speeds over 40MPH. In the end though, I think $500 was well worth it.

It's nice not being so rushed as with the house that we can have more time to save money.

1 comment:

Lou said...

They call him Johnsonstein.