How bad can it be? Very, very bad. You would think that a home inspector would have had some inkling about a potential water issue given the size of this problem. Nope. Nothing. The only issues he noted in his report were related to the lack of handrails on the porches and stairs. Yes, that was probably an issue, but it was also one that we were clearly able to realize on our own.
After several weeks of searching for a contractor to make the repairs on the front room (for a reasonable price), we finally found one that was willing to do the work. The front mudroom of the house was built over a crawl space and the builders actually back filled about 1.5 feet of dirt back to the house and on top of the stone work. All of the 2×4 framing and stone had to be removed and replaced with a low cinder block wall given the grade around the house.
The contractor worked to replace the wood studs with the cinder block wall and then began removing Hardie siding to replace the rotten chipboard behind it. Turns out, the chipboard was rotten basically to the roof line.
We talked about just replacing the rotten wood and going back with new Hardie siding, but I was a little uneasy. I knew that we had potential issues surrounding every window on the house due to the lack of flashing. So, we decided that it was probably best to remove ALL of the Hardie siding. It was not a decision we came to lightly. It was purely motivated by fear. Fear of replacing each section of the house — slowly and expensively.
In my mind I could just see the dollar signs continue to add up. The first contractor we met with quoted us $21,000 for labor only to remove the stone and repair the damaged wood behind it. We figured out the stone replacement was going to run around $25,000 on top of labor. Those were not options we could consider. So, we came up with a different plan.
This is a second home and we would like to spend as much time enjoying our time there as we can. We did not want to spend those precious days working on house maintenance. So, we decided to go maintenance free.
Gen Z House 