For the next couple of days, I’ll have hot sweaty construction workers climbing all over my house, for today the siding project begins.

And it’s about time, too, as I’ve been hanging on waiting for this to get scheduled for a while now, as I booked the job and paid the deposit quite a long time ago. Yeah, I know, there’s time built in for paperwork, and ordering the materials and all that, but the sitting around and waiting for it to happen was a constant low-level stressor that I didn’t particularly need.

But, it’s over now, or will be, in the next couple of days. They’re scheduled to start Monday morning. It really got started Thursday around lunchtime, when the truck came by to drop off a couple of thousand square feet of vinyl siding, trim, and insulation. That stuff’s been sitting in my driveway dwarfing my car all weekend, but it’s here, and serves as a tangible reminder that progress is being made. I also appear to have some small measure of dominion over the weather, as I made sure to cover the stuff securely with very large tarpaulins; a ritual that seems to have diverted the effects of Hurricane Arthur – my neighborhood remained blissfully(?) dry all weekend while many other places did not.

We did a little bit of prep work over the weekend; my wife and daughter repainted our exterior doors a clean, bright white to match the trim that will be going up, and since we took stuff off anyway, we replaced the front door knocker and kickplate with shiny new hardware that actually matches the doorknob. I also ventured out and bought a twelve-foot pruning thing (one of those big sawblades on a telescoping stick) and engaged in some long overdue trimming of the limbs that hung a bit too close to the house. Things are much cleaner in that regard now (except for the one limb which currently has baby robins residing on it; that one can wait a while), which should make the newly sided house look a bit more attractive, and leave the construction zone largely obstruction-free.

Otherwise, we played it a bit low-key for the Independence Day weekend; getting together with friends for a backyard barbeque on Friday, followed by a few hours hanging out along the James River near their house, enjoying the pleasant weather. The rest of the weekend was taking care of normal weekend stuff (plus the above activites) and an evening hanging otu with friends for a pleasant evening of making each other laugh and getting totally trounced by a first-timer playing Ticket To Ride Europe.

I’m hoping this week is, aside from the obvious, relatively quiet and uneventful. Other than the usual stuff and some music-making (which probably counts as usual), I could use a break before all the travelling various bits of us have scheduled in the coming week or two.

So, anyway…busy, but still pretty pedestrian, which is a pretty good definition of life most of the time, come to think of it.