You can’t tell from the fact that I’m writing this article, but I hate that the whole world has to know that we’re redoing our siding. There’s no secret way to do this. I don’t know whose idea it was to put siding on the outside of the house, where it could get ruined.
Not that our old siding is ruined. We don’t actually remember why we’re replacing it.

Okay, we’re replacing it because some salesman convinced us to. He was like, “If you buy siding, we’ll throw in insulation,” and we were like, “Yeah! We need insulation! I guess that means we should get siding!”

To this day, I have no idea what was wrong with our old siding, but he was very convincing at the time.

“Are you going to wait until pieces of your old siding start falling off?” he asked.

I don’t know. Maybe. We don’t fix our car before it breaks.

We totally need insulation, though. Currently, our entire house is protected by a fragile sheet of aluminum foil. (I know this, because I peeked inside the walls when we installed an air conditioner a few years ago.)

But according to this guy, the new siding actually comes with insulation. This was a big selling point for us. Though, as we later found out, the insulation is actually part of the siding. Everyone gets it. The siding comes out of the box attached to huge pieces of Styrofoam that help it keep its shape during shipping. They leave it on, and that’s the insulation. This wasn’t something he was throwing in.

And yes, Styrofoam. At first I thought that sounded weak—worse than your house being insulated by a layer of aluminum foil—but then I remembered that most drink coolers are made out of Styrofoam. Also Styrofoam cups.

So now our house is packed in Styrofoam, in case we want to ship it somewhere. (It’s a small house.)

Anyway, here are the steps to putting on siding, which I learned by watching my siding guys.

Step 1: Step one is to show up on a random day at six in the morning and start banging on the upstairs walls, right outside our bedroom. Are they standing on scaffolding? When did they build scaffolding?

Step 2: Actually, step one is to bring supplies and a dumpster. And then leave them in front of our house for several days. The contractors were supposed to start on a Tuesday, so the company brought the supplies on Monday, and then the guys didn’t show up until Thursday. So for three days, we just had siding and an empty dumpster. And I was wondering: Do they want us to build it ourselves?

In the meantime, we had a dumpster sitting out in front of our house for three days, including alternate side day, and it didn’t get a ticket. Or it did, and the ticket went straight in the dumpster.

Step 3: Hire several guys with no fear of heights who are willing to walk on scaffolding in the rain at six in the morning with heavy tools. Preferably, these guys should be foreign. Why are workers always foreign? Do Americans not know how to do anything, or, if we’d go to a foreign country, would we see Americans doing the construction? Like if you go to Mexico, do they say, “Why don’t you just hire an American?”

“Because they’re lazy.”

Step 4: No matter what step of the project you’re technically up to, start every morning by banging directly outside the bedroom wall. I think they want me to wake up and move my car.

Because apparently, the way to take down old aluminum siding is by banging. They’ve been banging on my walls all week. It’s like living inside a bell.

Step 5: Apparently, you have to start taking off the old siding from the top of the house, but you have to start putting on the new siding from the bottom of the house, because everything overlaps. So the bedrooms are going to be cold the entire week and have no privacy. Because of the guys standing right outside.

Step 6: Once the workers started on Thursday, my wife was very concerned about Shabbos. She told them they had to be out before sundown on Friday, which, as it turns out, was not a problem for them, because they weren’t exactly dying to walk around on wet scaffolding in the dark.

So they left for Shabbos, with most of the downstairs insulated and most of the upstairs not only with no new insulation, but with no old insulation either. Or siding. It was freezing upstairs. And we had company for Shabbos.

Point is, our guests spent a lot of time hanging out downstairs, which was kind of nice. I hope they come again.

But now the contractors are done, and it’s finally warmer upstairs. That’s how the process works. This is how it worked with the windows. They come and take out all your windows at once, and then they put in new windows, and you’re like, “Hey! It’s warmer with the new windows than it was with no windows!” and then you pay them. And the same thing happened with the siding. They’re gone now, and we’re warm. Though this could be because as soon as they left, it was suddenly 75 degrees outside. In December.

You know how they say that if you buy something new, you’ll never have to use it? We bought insulation.

By Mordechai Schmutter

 Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia, among other papers. He also has five books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].