A letter about the house

Family property · inland Southern California · 2025–26

A ten-item list is a short document. This one asked for the entire exterior of a house, inside a year.

The house mid-job: the gable end stripped back to bare rafters, siding part replaced, a ladder against the wall and the air-conditioning unit in the foreground

The stuck thing

In May 2025 State Farm wrote to say the policy on my mother’s house would not continue unless an inspector’s list was cleared. Ten items. The house is in a small desert town, and I am her caregiver and the person on site.

Carriers across California have been shedding older houses for several years now, and once one of them walks away the next policy is harder to get and costs more — if it can be had at all. So this was not a negotiation. It was a deadline with a house attached to it.

The diagnosis

The list named symptoms, not scope. Gable boards. Fascia boards. Soffit boards. Siding. The A/C duct penetrations. A board behind the water heater. Repainting. A refrigerator on the back porch. Dead trees and an overgrown juniper. The roof.

Written that way it reads as ten separate errands. It isn’t. Repainting sits downstream of six of the others — you cannot prime and finish a wall whose siding, trim, fascia, soffit and gable boards are still to be cut, fitted and sealed. So the first real task was working out what each item actually required, what it required first, and what could be done in what order without doing anything twice. Assessment, then sequence, then materials, then the work.

I wrote it up as a plan and kept it in revision. It ordered the work from most complex and effortful to least, longest poles first. It carried a month-by-month timeline. It broke the house into four elevations and ran the same six-step procedure across each one — siding, then any defect found behind it, then power-wash the old paint off, then fascia, rake, soffit, gable and frieze boards, then sills and trim, then prime and paint — with a matrix tracking which elevation had cleared which step. Every task carried a mark for whether it was done and for who besides me could do it.

A screenshot from the remediation plan. Heading: General Procedure. Six numbered steps — 1 Remove and replace siding or patch where practicable; 2 Correct any other defects necessary before washing and painting; 3 Power wash off old paint; 4 Replace or repair fascia, rake, soffit, gable and/or frieze boards; 5 Patch or replace sills and trim; 6 Prime and paint. Below, a table headed Sections with rows North, East, South and West and columns 1 to 6. Every elevation is marked X for steps 1 through 5 and a slash, meaning in progress, for step 6. — four elevations, six steps, tracked — the plan as it stood on 18 November 2025, with the paint still ongoing

Made it go

Takeoffs before purchase: fifty-six gable boards in twenty-seven matched pairs, from eight inches to nearly fifty-six; siding counted panel by panel and wall by wall against an inventory of salvaged cut-downs; twenty-five feet of J-track, which I ended up bending by hand from aluminum sheet rather than buying. Porch soffit boards were ripped and reused where the weathered ends allowed, with fence boards filling the long gaps.

Gable boards split, cupped and shedding paint, with bare weathered wood showing through — gable boards, as found

The same gable, new boards fitted and painted, with the louvred vent reset — fifty-six boards, twenty-seven matched pairs

A roof corner with the fascia and rake boards rotted away, exposing the framing beneath — fascia and rake, rot back to the framing

The same corner rebuilt, with new fascia, dark trim and flashing above it — new fascia with the flashing reinstalled over it

Two of the ten were awkward rather than large. The A/C ducts pass through the wall at an angle nothing off the shelf fits, and the earthquake board behind the water heater sat where the siding courses met the heater housing at odd sizes; both wanted flashing and siding cut and formed to suit, one piece at a time. The painting was the long one: a full power-wash back to sound material, trim and corner repair, filling, sanding, cleaning, primer, then two coats.

An air-conditioning duct passing through the wall, the siding around it stripped and the sheathing weathered and rotted — the duct penetration, as found

The same duct with new siding around it and sheet-metal flashing formed to the duct’s angles — formed to suit, one piece at a time

The wall beside the water-heater enclosure with siding removed, bare sheathing and an oriented-strand-board patch visible next to the window — the water-heater wall with newly required earthquake board, exposed

The same wall finished, with new siding running behind the water-heater housing and trim around the window — board, siding and flashing cut to meet the housing

Where the plan turned out to be wrong, the plan says so. The new fascia was meant to slot under the existing flashing through a cut channel; in the event I removed the flashing, reinstalled it over the new board in a new position, and patched the eave cuts. That line is still in the document with the original approach above it. A plan nobody amends is a plan nobody used.

The plan is the instrument. The proposals that won projects at Room 5 did the same job, and so did the one that earned a thirty-by-forty-foot bay at a Reno workshop — a document that moves a resource somebody else controls.

I had specified which tasks my mother, my brother and my uncle could take. My uncle came and helped for a stretch; my mother worked on painting and on digging out the dead trees. Most of it fell to me anyway, which is the usual ratio.

Nine of the ten were corrected. The tenth was the roof, which the inspector had recorded as curling and splitting and which was doing neither; that one was answered with photographs. The whole thing went back as a before-and-after document, item by item. The work ran from June 2025 to June 2026. The policy held.

The back of the house with failing paint, weathered siding and stored items across the yard — the back of the house, June 2025

The same view painted and trimmed, the siding sound and the yard cleared — the same view, twelve months later

assessment & scoping · project planning · materials takeoff · exterior carpentry · sheet-metal forming · siding & flashing · prep & painting · technical documentation

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