Tonight, we’re going to divert away from real estate sales and delve into a little home maintenance. I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been pretty busy around the house….well, very busy.

Being in real estate, I think about curb appeal all the time and most often when I’m pulling into my own driveway. We purchased this home 6 years ago. We fell in love with it because it’s not your average cookie-cutter house, even though it’s on a cookie-cutter street.

The front of our home is covered with beautiful cedar siding. We didn’t know anything about cedar siding when we bought the house, all we knew was that we liked the look.

In the spring, yes spring, we were hit with an extreme two hail storms right in a row. This storm damaged everything. Tore our screens to shreds, damaged our roof, put a hole in the hardboard siding on the side of our house—-you get the picture. Since then, we’ve been having everything fixed and replaced. We’d like to leave it in better condition than when we bought it. Anyway, this has put us outside a lot and I’ve been looking at the cedar siding even more than usual and it’s become an eyesore. It’s all dark, old, and stained looking.

So, we do our research and read several blogs about how to maintain our siding. Step 1, spray down with diluted OxyClean. Step 2, clean siding with a brush. Step 3, rinse. Step 4, waterproof/stain. Perfect, sounds easy. We get the OxyClean, the sprayer and a brush, and we get started one Friday night after work.

OHHHHH MYYYY!!

Sounds easy. Mind you, we haven’t touched the siding for the 6 years we’ve lived here, so it’s probably a little extra dirty. Either way, we were not prepared for the amount of work that ensued over the next 3 days—-we finished Monday afternoon. Here’s the REAL instructions: Step 1, spray down with diluted OxyClean until wood is saturated. Some pieces may even need a second coat. Step 2, wait about 15 minutes for the OxyClean to do its thing. Step 3, scrub each and every board thoroughly until it’s free of dirt and grime. (We found this to take about 5 minutes per board) Step 4, rinse and scrub at the same time. Step 5, completely rinse entire area free of debris and start on the next section. Step 6, well that would be waterproofing/sealing—-we haven’t gotten to that step yet. Maybe this weekend?

Needless to say, the siding looks great already, our driveway?…Not so much.

See ya on the flipside—I’ll be back to my usual posts soon.