Brick Hoouuusssseeee (cue Commodores)

Brick. Adding brick to an existing 120 year old house. Nobody does that. Enter the Perfors Farmhouse. Enter a general contractor up for the challenge.

Here goes nothin’! Planning and insurance wrestling took 6 months. Construction took 8 weeks including abatement, tear-off, and brick. And today, we finished the transition from peach vinyl to brick house.

We love maintaining the look of the Victorian Farmhouse. In this case, we strayed from the Farmhouse preservation… a little. Staying true to Victorian for this area. Never again will a hail storm sweep through and wreck us. Never will we have to maintain, re-paint, or repair home siding again. Yessssss. Worth it.

Know the feeling when a stock market slumps and your stocks plummet? You know you just gotta hang on and it’ll come back (b/c you never sell low, right?!), but it’s gut-wrenching in the middle. That’s how I felt walking out every morning to a house that looks like this. Gulp. Just hang on, just hang on.

Naked house

First, the house got naked. Real naked. 3 layers, count ’em, 3 LAYERS of siding came off. Including 1 asbestos. Dudes in white space suits surrounded the house like E.T.

Know the feeling when a stock market slumps and your stocks plummet? You know you just gotta hang on and it’ll come back (b/c you never sell low, right?!), but it’s gut-wrenching in the middle. That’s how I felt walking out every morning to a house that looks like this. Gulp. Just hang on, just hang on.

Lessons Learned

1. Hiring a GC to do the work, doesn’t mean you don’t do any work (and we have a great GC).
2. They will clean. You will clean. Then, there will be more cleaning to do. During construction, wall bits fell into our house daily. It loved falling right on the stove and the dining room table (figures). Now the project is done, the crew cleaned, the GC’s cleaned, we cleaned, and there is still somehow shit all over. Yesterday we found 30 ft of old wires in the front yard. There are mortar splotches all over the windows. Dirt piles (really, PILES) in every windowsill. No big deal except we have 16 windows just on the first floor. Got too tired of counting before I hit the 2nd story.
3. Nothing ever finishes on time, no matter how large or small the task. Never. Not even close. Literally nothing got done on time from a small single window screen to the big job deadlines. Never done a big project? Get used to it. It’s bizarre. In my industry, I get reamed out by clients for going past deadlines. Over the years of hiring contractors I’ve learned that it’s the same industry-wide. What I will never get (and my husband shakes his head at this and goes “get over it..”) is why they don’t learn from their own deadline-missing experiences and pad timelines. Do they all want to sound like they finish fastest when bidding? Maybe, but as a homewoner, I’d pick quality over speed any day, wouldn’t you? Ok, ok, rant over. To be clear, I loved our GCs and crew, I’m just confused about this industry-wide and bullet #3 seemed an excellent spot to present my case :-).
4. The crew are humans. Like you, like me. Treat them as such (like they deserve) and they will take good care of you.
5. Go with a GC who cares. Ours did; and it mattered. A lot. They weren’t the biggest, and they weren’t the fastest. But they cared. And in the end they nailed it. Results speak for themselves.
6. Nails will be everywhere. You will need to replace your tires. Don’t be bitter.

Left side: original siding. Right side: extension put on in 1980s, all siding had to go.

This starts with putting up the gray stuff (my technical term). While the house is naked, you get lots of flies. House isn’t exactly well-sealed naked…

Let’s Brick This Bitch. I mean house.

This stage was a month. A month of scaffolding and full-time crews for company. Of very confused package delivery services (“Ummm where’s the 🚪 ?” -UPS). Of having 1 of 6 doors to go in and out of the house at a time, that changed daily. We played ring-around-the-rosy around the house to figure out which door we could get to that day.

The crew worked so hard. They did great work.

Home stretch. These guys worked ’til dark almost every day.

Some of us didn’t mind the scaffolding at all…

Before and After

What we put on is thin brick. Enjoy the before-and-afters, any more writing from me just gets in the way of the fun…

Before and after, back of the house.

Yea we’re not spending the cash to brick a garage. We’re not crazies.

Painting the top gables/decor is on the to-do list. We’re going to paint it to match the new garage colors. Current challenge: figuring out how to get me up that high without breaking the bank or killing myself. Harder than you’d guess.

Yea, we need shutters. We know. One step at a time…

Don’t panic, we’re painting the doors. They’re not staying red. Trying out a color today! Stay tuned.

Oh, I’ve wanted to upgrade those sconces for soooo long.

Kept this old light. Love it.

Still need to do the door. We’ll get there…

The masonry quality is really solid. We lucked out with our GC and crew.

This was our project. They finished it for us to help us out. That was such a nice bonus. We’d been working on that walkout for over a year.

We kept the window box/trim and had the guys only replace the panes. We wanted to keep all of our original wood trim. I guess that’s an unusual request, because the window quote guys REALLY struggled with “just the panes”.

Brick house: mission accomplished. Now, on to the next one. Fixer uppers never end.