Monthly Archives: November 2008

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."

- Douglas Adams

I know, I know - it's been a long time since I posted one of these. But lately I've taken a renewed interest in increasing my posting frequency. So here's to the resurection of "42 Words of Wisdom"! This one hits especially close to home. As some of you may know, I recently discovered that the previous owner of our house had built the front porch himself, and had botched it. When he attached the ledger to the house, he didn't bother using any flashing. So due to the lack of $10 worth of flashing, water has been seeping behind the ledger for years. Once I tore down the porch and pulled off the siding, I found that a significant amount of the house's framing that was behind the porch had rotted out. At this point I've got all of the rotted wood replaced, and that section resided. But now I've still got to build a new porch - hopefully before the winter sets in. This going to end up costing us hundreds of dollar, and costing me hours and hours of time, just because someone couldn't be bothered to spend $10 and 5 minutes to install flashing - which is not exactly a closely-guarded secret of professional contractors. On the plus side, I was never really happy with the original porch and don't mind the chance to rebuild it the way I'd like to. I just would have preferred to hold off until next year to do it.