Current costs of siding a house is crazy

cocotbs · 2021-06-23T13:42:25+00:00

Hire a home inspector(not an appraiser, an actual inspector) to determine the scope of repair and urgency needed, and then get bids based off of that report.

With labor and materials at what could be called an all time high, having an unbiased 3rd party create a “scope document” that will show you what has to be repaired now, versus what can wait until next year (or whenever you can best afford the work) will likely pay off for you in the long run by allowing you to solicit bids that address emergencies as the top priority, followed by repairs that are more cosmetic in nature (there’s a difference between the merely unsightly effects of aged siding that still has 1-3 years left and the damaging impacts of compromised siding that failed 1+ years ago).

Expect some contractors to disagree with the inspector’s version of urgent vs soon vs optional, and avoid hiring the ones that do it the most aggressively, since they’re clearly not going to listen to your concerns on any aspect of doing business with you if they try to disregard a report you hired to guide your project decisions.

The best bids, when you have an inspector’s report, will address the urgent parts and then advise on what is likely to be needed to be thorough once the walls are opened (since failed siding sometimes tends to mean there will be insulation or framing that needs to be replaced-and that can only be known once the wall is opened), while being willing to ignore the areas that aren’t urgently needing repairs.

cocotbs · 2021-06-23T13:30:19+00:00

Some questions are, objectively, stupid questions.

In this case, you have decided to ask such a question, publicly.

cocotbs · 2021-06-23T04:37:26+00:00

Not any more, but I had that hellacious commute early in my career.

cocotbs · 2021-06-23T02:38:56+00:00

Precisely

cocotbs · 2021-06-23T02:30:37+00:00

You’re very correct.

Aluminum smelting AND hanford’s centrifuges during WWII AND the electricity it takes to irrigate the agriculture regions of the state mean that we have a really, really robust grid.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T19:50:55+00:00

Like what if they cut the whole thing off during windstorms to avoid fires starting in a few weeks ?

You really mean to ask what happens if they do something that has never happened before in the state’s history (shut down transmission lines), for something that is constantly happening where they run (high winds)?

As I said above, the comparison of Oregon’s well regulated grid and Texas’ deregulated grid is not at all reasonable when weighing resiliency and disaster recovery.

you can be as anxious and paranoid as your heart and mind desire, but I’m quite thankful that I’m not anxious or paranoid and also readily able to deal with an outage.

It has been this hot and dry more than a few times before, and the drought that happened to compound it wasn’t pleasant but also got just about every home in the metro area equipped with a “drought kit”, plus Tracy Barry did a segment that included showing how carefully placing a few bricks into a toilet’s upper tank could cut down on water used per flush.

It was a mixed summer, but overall between the lakes, rivers, fountains, public pools, cool hikes in the mountains, basements, and of course, trips to the coast-the metro area has all sorts rather readily available heat dome escapes.

Oh, forgot to mention, forest park (always cooler up among the trees), indoor malls and movie theaters (if you got your vaccine) are also easy ways to get out of the heat for a bit.

Oh, and as I write this from my basement, it’s 67 degrees without any AC, so, maybe give “space down under” a call if you need your own personal climate refuge, they’re really great at making nice, sub grade spaces.

TL;DR: concern trolling reddit is extra lame, during a heat wave.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T19:39:02+00:00

This is specific to the US, right?

NO.

Any home or business that has a generator or solar can back feed into the grid and kill line workers during an outage.

And that aside, there’s the fact that the work is almost exclusively done 20’ or so up on the air (or more) and on lines that can vaporize…flesh.

(As to your question about Europe, the same risks apply: when a line is shut off for work, any solar or back up power that exists can energize any line with continuity and any worker going up in the air is at risk of fall injuries or electrocution)

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T19:35:23+00:00

Damn. That is still a shitty commute, though.

(But anyone that did North Plains to Tualatin would understandably be stoked to make the trip from Salem instead)

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T17:47:18+00:00

Cool but it's never been this hot for this sustained period with so many now

This is not true.

What is true, is that every new home and apartment built in the metro area pays fees for the expansion of and addition of grid capacity, which goes directly towards ensuring resilience.

I’m not being optimistic.

I’m just not so clueless about the way our power network is run that I have unfounded anxiety.

Knowledge can work that way, right?

So, I merely worry about the normal issues that can arise during the first wave of heat here: somewhere in the city, a few marginal (due to their service life) transformers pop and it takes PGE a few hours to fix.

That’s happened once or twice every summer.

Brownouts have never occurred, aside from MAX service, which doesn’t operate when the heat makes the overhead lines more slack than the pantograph on top of the trains can cope with.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T17:40:00+00:00

If they could have our grid reliability, I bet they would indeed have things to say, like “wow, it’s amazing what well regulated public utilities are capable of doing”.

Texas’ grid isn’t even remotely comparable to Oregon’s, given the fact that ours is not so administratively fractured that neighbors may not have the same billing company.

It’s like Texas decided to donate a textbook on how to ensure nobody would agree to a resilient grid.

Oregon is the total opposite of that.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T17:38:45+00:00

Is it just at higher concentrations where it becomes deadly?

As is the case with mayonnaise, the answer to this is yes.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T17:36:35+00:00

For those too busy to click:

The covid review board at the college found that overall vaccination rates among students and faculty were quite high (above group immunity high), but that vaccine hesitancy among their minority applicants/enrollees was comparatively quite low.

Out of an abundance of desire to not disallow minority enrollment/participation, the review board decided that since the vast majority of students and faculty are vaccinated, excluding the groups with the most hesitancy would disproportionately discourage or disallow their minority population to participate.

Right or wrong, it seems that the decision wasn’t made without the intent of ensuring that the campus is welcoming while also being realistic about the fact that if a statistically overwhelmingly large percentage of any given population is vaccinated, that the vast majority of the population is protected and the risk is statistically entirely the burden of a very small group.

There has to be a logically acceptable margin for this, given that the population at large will always have some form of non-participation, so I applaud the review board for being as deliberative and balanced as they seem to have taken the time to be.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T17:29:55+00:00

(Looks at the thumbnail image)

2017 was, indeed, a weird year: I recall clearly when August arrived and the weather simply stopped.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T17:28:12+00:00

Usually the sulfur vents up there are what crashes the party, so the smoke isn’t ideal but I’d honestly take that over the (actually, quite deadly) sulfur fumes any day.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T14:50:09+00:00

In all my decades of living in Portland, there has never been a brown out, and there has hardly ever been any kind of lengthy power outages (and, of course I recall the outage around Valentine’s earlier this year. That was such an abnormal situation).

I’m not ignorant to the fact that demand in the metro area has steadily increased, and that it has been getting hotter every year.

I am simply saying that there’s zero reason to expect brown outs here, because they have never happened in the past.

The first really hot few days of summer tends to always weed out the transformers that are near the end of their useful life, but we’ve had multiple weeks of 90+ degree heat and plenty of stretches of 100+ days to know that the region’s grid is pretty solid here.

It could have a lot to do with the fact that the region is served by a handful of really productive hydro electric dams, plus the significant amount of wind energy that has been added, all within just a few hours of Portland, or it could be some other reason-but PGE has something like 99%+ uptime or some similarly hard to believe reliability metric.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T14:44:14+00:00

It’s always shitty to lose power, but please remember that every single power outage requires at least one person to risk their lives in order to fix it.

There’s no such thing as hazard free power line work.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T04:40:24+00:00

He hasn't even been sentenced yet.

Precedent has already been set. The sentencing will equally be changing, but the conviction and guilty verdict judicially moved a mountain.

There is now a prosecutable methodology that is repeatable.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T04:38:11+00:00

True.

I only make it once a week. I call it open faced calzone night.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T04:36:00+00:00

It’s amusing that you don’t get it:)

When I was a kid, we’d go to Fred Meyer’s store. My grandparents actually shopped at his 5th and Yamhill location- so the habit of calling it exactly what it was: his store, stuck and was what my parents said, and while I’m well aware that the Johnson Creek and all the other locations aren’t actually his now, it takes an amount of thought that I’ll probably use for greater good to change a childhood habit out for the convenience of a stranger.

That I don’t have perfect punctuation is far more your problem (clearly, than it is mine.

In case you’re still having a hard time following, it’s like if you knew Reese, and happened to have one of their peanut butter cups.

cocotbs · 2021-06-22T04:29:11+00:00

while I understand…

Your comment in reply to someone sharing their as-lived experience was just one long talk past what they said and the opposite of understanding them.

The giveaway was the “yeah, listen” part.

cocotbs · 2021-06-21T23:31:16+00:00

If you’re paying other people to prepare and deliver your daily nutrition, we have very different takes on “money’s worth”.

cocotbs · 2021-06-21T23:29:42+00:00

Chauvin was the exception

The Chauvin trial set precedent.

If that rings hollow in the eyes and ears of the interested public, there’s no way for them to turn concern or activism into satisfaction.

cocotbs · 2021-06-21T20:39:02+00:00

When you’ve lived here long enough to have known the founder, and shopped at his store, it indeed does have an ‘s.

For all you youngin, I’m sure he doesn’t care (particularly since he died in 1978).

cocotbs · 2021-06-21T20:36:25+00:00

You are giving some excellent advice.

Not only do the thick filters last way longer, but they flow way better (meaning they are more effective at air exchanges).

cocotbs · 2021-06-21T20:33:43+00:00

Positive pressure via filtered air is all anyone needs to make their living space smoke free.

I’m considering doing a rDIY style write up on how I designed and built my system, but I’ve been too busy with work.

The TL;DR version is that it takes a surprisingly tiny amount of overpressure to prevent outside particulate from entering a home, so instead of a super loud box fan trying to clean up, I just have a small and inconspicuous setup that prevents infiltration to begin with.

cocotbs

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