Bees..... The Sting

It all started with the Bees. A couple of weeks ago, Carolyn was out on the deck and she was attacked by bees. She got stung twice. I went and got the wasp/hornet spray and began attacking the area the bees came from. The following week, Carolyn was getting some kitchen stuff out from under one of our counters, and again, the bees went on the offensive and she got stung twice again. I then got out the spray and sprayed the heck out of the area the bees came from. Following the advice of some friends, I decided to bring in a professional bee man. Boots was his name. Boots was a character. He had to be in his 70's and yet had a mind as sharp as a tack. He did some poking around. He determined that the bees had absconded (left). I knew that the siding on our house was a haven for wasps, so I decided that a little renovation was in order. Since I was going to be working on the siding of our home, I decided that the best course of action was to close some of the gaps and put in new windows. I borrowed a scaffolding from Brian Hebert at Mena Steel Buildings Incorporated. It took us a bit to figure out the setup. The only real hitch with the front of the house is the fact that the ground isn't level and the scaffolding leaned a bit. I think this made Joe nervous when both of us were on the top at the same time. In the end we ended up working a high/low with one up and the other down.

I contacted Joe and he found some time in his schedule to come down and help me out. Our first scheduled time didn't quite work out, so we rescheduled to a time that was more convenient for him to come down. So... For the last three days, Joe and I have been tackling the house. My house is a cozy little two-story house with cedar siding. Little did we know what we had in store for us. I borrowed a scaffolding from Brian Hebert at Mena Steel Buildings Incorporated. It took us a bit to figure out the setup. The only real hitch with the front of the house is the fact that the ground isn't level and the scaffolding leaned a bit. I think this made Joe nervous when both of us were on the top at the same time. In the end we ended up working a high/low with one up and the other down.

On the first day, we pulled the siding around the 4 windows at the front of the house. Behind a couple of spots in the siding, the wasps let themselves be known. Joe did a good bit of the attacking, using up one can of wasp spray. After a short break, I took up the job of wasp assassin. The siding ended up taking a good part of the morning. Then we replaced the four windows on that side. What should have been a simple repair and replace, took us the whole day. I was dog-tired by the end of the day.

On the morning of day two, we reattached the siding around the windows and then moved to the side of the house just after lunch. It took us the remainder of the day just to replace the one window on the side and then put the siding back up around it. Because the windows in the bedrooms are a little different than those on the front of the house, I erred in my calculation of time we would need, plus I had to re-adjust my measurements. Of course the re-adjustment was discovered after I had already prepared the window trim based on the way the front windows fit. After, finally getting the window in place, we re-attached the siding. By this time, we were pretty tired and had to get ready to go to the Fish Net for dinner (Great food, as always). Then we decided to completely call it a day.


Because we only had one more day, we knew that we had to replace 5 windows and siding in one day on the back side of the house. We ended up getting a bit of a late start, but because we had already figured out the placement of windows, we were able to get on a bit of a roll. We had a return of the wasp wars on the back of the house. Joe even took a sting by one. By mid-afternoon we had replaced 4 windows and put the trim back on. After a short lunch break, we hit the final window. This ended up taking us quite a bit longer that I would have liked due to difficulty with the siding, but by early evening, we had it kicked out.



Then came the fun of taking the scaffolding apart so that I could return it on Monday morning. We gathered up the tools and called it a night. By this time it was after 7 pm. The whole job was a great learning experience for both of us. We both decided that when they put the siding on the house, they made a whole lot of mistakes, and some of them are impossible to fix in a short period of time. Who knows. I'm sure that I'll eventually fix all of the siding. My next task will be to power wash the entire house and seal the fresh cedar with a stain/sealer. But that will have to be another entry entirely.

I want to thank Jamie and Joe for their awesome contribution of time, sweat, and fun while doing this job. Also, if you ever need a metal roof or just about any other construction need, I would recommend MSBI for the job. Thanks Brian for the loan of the scaffolding. Would couldn't have done the job without it. In the end, it is so cool to be able to actually look out of the windows. The old windows weren't properly sealed and you couldn't see anything out of most of them. The whole job was a lot of fun, but a ton of work.

The moral of this whole story is, if you are going to tackle a big job. Allow three to four times your estimated labor time. I know that this would have made me reconsider doing all ten windows at once.