AllState grrrrrrr

That deadline for fixing all of our "major" issues for AllState (grrr) is this Friday, September 14.
The 8 issues were:
1. chimney - bricks are crumbling
2. chimney - mortar is deteriorating
3. shingles over skylight are curled
4. shingles over skylight are damaged
5. there is gap growth in the shingles (aka there is a gap)
6. dry rot on garage
7. paint is peeling on the garage
8. broken glass in window over garage back door

minor issue:
9. tree overhangs our roof

After many phonecalls to AllState, it became clear that they essentially wanted us to fix 4 things: the chimney, the shingles, paint the garage, fix the window. (Turns out our neighbors just had the tree trimmed last year and it's perfectly healthy, so I let AllState, grr, know it's not really an issue, and they gave me a pass) It makes tons of sense, of course, to break these problems down into multiple MAJOR issues and then inform us that because there are so many, they'll cancel our plan. "If you had 4 or fewer major issues, you could've received a one year extension to fix the issues. Sorr-y...." (AllState, grr).

So we had the chimney taken out (issues 1-2), and I made lemonade, remember? Again, several calls to AllState later, we got away with gluing down a few shingles (uh, what? OK not gonna complain).

I SUPPose it's "crumbling" and "deteriorating"

gone

if you look closely at the skylight shingles, you'll see some are flipped up a little

you can see the liquid nails we used to glue down the shingle

So that took care of issues 3-8.
Over the weekend, Dan and I scraped and painted our barn:

Peeling paint and dry rot. The so-called dry rot is the dark greenish spots, but it's not even rotted, really. Just discolored.

Much better. Not that we ever see this side of the barn, but our neighbors do. You're welcome.

"dry rot" vanquished.

Dan had to borrow an EVEN BIGGER ladder to get higher up

very nice.

Painting and scraping was kind of fun at first. I was being quite thorough and carefully, artfully painting every little peeled-off spot. Dan would yell at me, "it doesn't have to be perfect, this doesn't matter, we don't care about the barn, AllState's gonna totally be happy with a sloppy job, chop-chop, move it along, stop re-painting the spots I already painted!!!" After we finished the back and moved on to the side, I started to feel pretty sick of the whole thing, so I started being more sloppy. It's just so hard to ignore the peeled spots!


I fixed two broken window panes in the window over the garage back door.

I ordered two pieces of glass cut to size (3.35$ each), then I scraped off the window glazing putty with a dryer in hand. The putty is quite hard and you don't want to put too much force into it or else you'll bang the broken glass and cut yourself, or possibly break unbroken glass, so you have to soften the putty with heat, preferably a blow torch, but a dryer will do (it's just very very slow).  Then you put in some new putty, stick in the window pane, pop in some glazier points (metal clasps to hold the glass), scrape away excess putty and you're done.

voila~

So this is what we've been occupied with lately instead of our dining room :(
But everything looks so much better, I guess it wasn't all bad. Fingers crossed that AllState (grr) will give us the OK and we won't lose our insurance and our mortgage and our house!