A home facelift, AKA replacing defective vinyl siding

My wife and I have been in our house for just over nine years.  A year or so after we moved into our house, we had problems with our vinyl siding.  We knew the siding we had was defective because we have some neighbors that had the same batch (same color even) installed, they had problems and they got their siding replaced.  However, we opted not to pursue a warranty claim at the time.  The contractor that built our house was not very good to respond.  Our siding issue at the time wasn't very bad (we had a few warped boards) so we decided to not do anything.

A couple of years ago we decided that we wanted to sell our house.  We actually listed our house on the market for six months, but nothing ever happened.  It was at that time that our vinyl siding looked like crap pretty pathetic.  It had warped in some spots and was severely faded.  We talked to a siding installer and he told us that our siding has a lifetime guarantee.  So we decided to pursue a warranty claim and get our known defective siding replaced.

Short story, we got the run around.  The local siding dealers were not very helpful (I'm being very kind here...).  The "limited" lifetime warranty wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.  And, get this, warranty services denied our claims.  We even had a company claims guy come out and look at our house and tell us specific issues that we had with our siding so we could get a claim.  Denied.  Literally, a year's worth of work all for nothing.  Needless to say, we were not happy.  So after trying for a year to get the issue resolved on our own locally, we decided to go talk to a regional manager and plead our case with him.  And the most amazing thing happened......  We called and told them our issue.  The very next day we were approved!  Yeehaw!  The local guys were still jerking us around, but we got it approved.  We order our product and it arrived at the house.

All good.  So we have the guys yank off the old siding.  And while we were at it, we had some brick work that was installed that we wanted redone.  So we asked one of the neighbors to help out.  Well, come to find out we had a bit of a problem with the house.  Check out this photo:

(C) Tom Larsen - 2010

Yep.  You guessed it.  Dry rot.  Our fake "cultured" rock and brick work was not done correctly.  I can't complain too loudly because I'm one of the installers.  The vinyl installers didn't help either.  But we had a bad installation and so we ended up with dry rot in a portion of the wall.  So we ripped out the rock so we can fix the dry rot problem.  In the end, we didn't want to do this ourselves.  So we asked this same neighbor to come and lay brick for us.  By the way, he did an excellent job.  I'll have to upload a photo or two of the finished product.

The brick work finished at 1:30 AM on Friday, November 5th.  The vinyl siding guys have done three of the four walls of my home.  Now that my brick is done, I hope they come back on Monday to do the front of my house.  But then again, the weather is supposed to be crappy on Monday, so that may not happen for a while.

So there you have it.  Our house had a face lift.  Now, where did I leave my drill?  Has anyone seen it?