The house on Haunted Hill gets a big make over

When the girls were going to elementary school some of the other kids used to make fun of our house. They said it looked like it was falling down. From the day we moved in we wanted to redo the outside. Originally we were going to do it in something called hardy plank, also called cement board because it does need painting and it also does not burn. The price on that when we looked into it a few years ago was going to be about $50,000.00. Of course that was an estimate from Empire State builders who started with a price on the current job at $49.000.00. So I guess if we had worked at it I could have gotten it down to maybe $38,000.00. We never went forward with the job for reasons I have forgotten. Maybe it was the next seven years of job loses and financial not quite disaster, but let's call it

misfortune. 

      Back in pre-COVID time of later 2019 early 2020 Teri and I remortgaged our house. We started some time in the fall and in typical Joe Muller fashion I took my time and we lucked into a dip in interest rates and we finished up the mortgage at the lawyers office with just the three of us some time in March 2020. The Lawyer telling us these pens were ours to use and no one touching anything that they didn't need to touch. It was all very weird and I wanted to celebrate after it was over and there was nothing open in Nyack. It might have been just after Cuomo imposed the complete shutdown of everything in the state. More weird was to come. Between the time we got the loan and last week I called people to give me estimates on replacing the roof and doing vinyl siding. In the beginning everyone was interested in doing the job, everyone was starving because the economy had been shut down. As things got better and the economy slowly opened up I got less response from people. It looked like I'd missed my window. I did contact Empire State builders. I'd forgotten they'd given me an estimate for Hardiplank years ago. Tom came in at $49,000.00, one of the highest estimates. He did also say he'd match any estimate. Long story short Affordable Roofing before they quit returning my calls gave me a price of $12,000.00 on the roof and $20,000.00 on the siding. (For all of you future people that's a whole

lot of money) Tom didn't exactly match the price, I'd lost the roof estimate from last year, but he came in close enough, $33,700.00. So we finalized everything, I gave him a deposit of $700.00 on Wednesday, on Friday they dropped roofing shingles and a monsterous dumpster. It has begun

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