I’ve got to credit my readers here at Watchdog Milwaukee — they’re loyal to a fault. But what’s going on here, you may have asked yourself? Why is there not the hard core reporting that we used to do on a daily basis?

Well there are a couple of reasons but none of them permanent.

Last February I started a fairly extensive home remodel. Truth be told it was just supposed to be a kitchen remodel but became much more. My spare time was not as plentiful as it once was and I set certain goals for myself at work which I am pleased to have been able to have met. But with those home improvement and work goals came time requirements and so Watchdog Milwaukee, at least temporarily, took a back seat.

Originally my goals for this website were to make it a place where I and the former editor of this blog, John-david Morgan, would be the nucleus and others would add contributing insight. It didn’t turn out that way. Others who were interested in this little blogosphere experiment decided to fade into the background and after just one post, were never to be seen again.

Well finally most of my home remodel is done and I’m not terribly interested in jumping into another project just yet. The walls came down and the ones I wanted to rebuild are up. The cabinets are in as are the countertops. In short, after nearly a year, I can look at that project and say “done”. It didn’t get that way quite the way I had hoped. One of the carpenters commented that he had a great idea and that was to replace a perfectly good window in my kitchen with a Pella patio door. Why would I want to put a piece of garbage like that in my house I thought? That’s like wearing an Armani suit and then covering it up with a cheap bath robe. But my wife liked the idea and I decided to go ahead and put a good energy efficient patio door (u-factor of .19 and glass R-value of 10) in. (No, I didn’t compromise my principles or the quality of my project by putting in a Pella. I put in a Quantum2 if anyone’s interested.)

But the patio door added another issue. I now had a 24 inch step down to the ground from my patio door. So I had this bright idea — take part of my deck that isn’t used and just migrate it over to in front of the patio door. After all, I thought, it would make sense and I would save money.

Or so I thought…

Well as I was taking off the top boards I discovered that the supports for the deck were rotting and I was lucky it didn’t collapse on me anytime in the last few years. There was no way it was up to code but apparently it was before my little village of Brown Deer started regulating deck building. So off the whole thing came. This led to two new problems. First, I still didn’t have a step down from the patio door but now I had a bit mud hole where the deck used to be and unfortunately the deck was attached to the house. The house is a 1960’s ranch style house where the original siding was wooden clapboard painted olive green. Some time in the 80’s from the best I can figure, someone had the house sided with a bluish gray aluminum but that was put on AFTER the deck. This meant that I had 18 inches on the bottom (where the deck was) now was olive green clapboard and above that it was bluish aluminum siding. Not good.

Let this be a lesson. It turns out that in order to repair aluminum siding that you have to take it down from the top and rebuild it with new stuff from the bottom. It’s the only way to do it without making it look like hell. It also turns out that about every 5 to 10 years, siding companies change their colors. Working in the home improvement industry I found out that the stuff that was put on my house was made by a company called Alside who no longer makes Wedgewood blue aluminum siding.

So I had to side the house.

I ended up using a spectacular product made by Heartland. It’s tri-pigmentation technlogy combined with some other stuff allows them to guarantee that my new pewter colored siding won’t fade much. Their Cedarmax siding gave me an R-value of 4 added onto the house.

But there was another problem. Because of the way that the aluminum window trim was put on my windows I would have windows that stuck out an extra inch and the trim wouldn’t look right. Remember, I acted as my own general contractor for the kitchen so I had a good sense for what can be done. The siding guys said they would have to re-trim my windows or just use a bunch of caulk which I didn’t believe would meet my standards. As it turned out I preferred to bring the dimensions of my siding out by adding an additional R-value of 4 to my house with foam panels. The cost would have been the same as to have the windows re-trimmed so they would look good. I had them side the garage as long as they were at it so it would look the same.

But there was another snafu. I have, or I should say had, a fireplace in my living room. It was a retrofit job added on with box construction to the outside of the house. Since the aluminum was off anyway I looked at it and I will admit I was concerned. None of the construction techniques met what I would consider to be my standards for rough carpentry — specifically framing and support. So what I did was I took pictures and took it to my local fireplace store. My fears were verified — this thing didn’t meet code. I could rebuild it right now before the siding went up or tear it off and reframe the hole. After tearing it off and doing a beautiful job of reframing the hole (16 inches on center of course), and doing an excellent job at drywalling the interior and closing off the exterior, I was ready for siding. I had a contractor do the siding.

So the siding is done. That still left me with a big mud hole.

Now I’ve got to share that I’ve done a lot of this project myself. A LOT. I’ve become a huge fan of shows like Rock Solid and Cool Tools. The guys from Rock Solid inspired me to do a patio instead of a new deck. After much thought I wrestled with whether to use New York Blue Stone or Flag Stones quarried a short drive from my house right in Lannon. After talking with the owner of the quarry, Monacelli Stone on Good Hope Road, I decided to go with Lannon stone. I lucked out. They had unearthed a beautiful vein of gray and white pieces but each was the size of a table top. I swear that some of those pieces must have been 800 pounds. What a hellish job that was.

My brother helped me on this project. We dug out the dirt / mud down about 7 inches and then laid a drain tile. We pitched the whole thing a quarter bubble and then laid down traffic bond which is finely crushed stone. The biggest piece is about the side of your little fingernail. I rented a compactor and smoothed it out. Then came the tough part — laying the stone. They’re not all the same thickness so you can’t just lay them down and hope it will be a nice smooth walk along your new patio. This summer I learned to be a stone mason. We cut, we scored, we broke, we chiseled .. we rocked. To make a longer story shorter, I now have a killer patio at about 1/6th of the cost it would have taken me to hire someone to do it.

Now if you’ve got a patio like I’ve got now it screams “party” right? And if you’re going to have a back yard you can entertain in, you’ve got to have a hot tub right? After all, if I spent all of this time on a kitchen and patio door that my bride wanted, I deserve a hot tub.

And that, my friends, is how I managed to spend an extra $21,000 on an expansion of my project that was just supposed to be the addition of a patio door.

So all of this being said and done, I’ve discovered an expensive addiction which I might give into this spring — remodeling.

I would do a few more things today but all of this work meant I deserved a little vacation. After finishing up a week long cruise, it turns out that I would be stuck in Detroit overnight due to the snow storm and airport closings unless I stayed here. So here I am, in San Juan, having just come out of the ocean on an 85 degree day.