“Vero Beach Siding Transformation: Replacing 80 Sheets of Rotten Sheathing for a James Hardie Finish”

“Dave Browne here with db Home Improvements. We’re in Indian River County in Vero Beach, Florida this morning, and we’re looking at quite a massive Hardie siding job that we did. We’ve been out here for about four months, I believe. Over 80 sheets of rotten sheathing that had to get changed out. It’s a two-floor house. And the homeowners had called probably two or three years ago, and we came out and looked at it, and he was deciding and grappling. It was quite a massive project, and finally, he decided to go with us. So today what we’re doing is we’re doing the punch list. We’re putting the cherry on the icing. So I thought I’d come down and take a look at what’s going on.

Working with all of the pool equipment and the air conditioners and the heaters and all that stuff, it’s a pain in the neck to get in there. And I give them great credit for doing such a great job around here because it’s a difficult work area; you don’t have a lot of space. Oh, I got to put that on the painter’s list. Oops, sorry. I forgot that was—I better put that on the punch list for the painter. There’s one out front, too. There’s a repair—oh, there’s a repair out front. Yes, there is. Yep. That y’all did. It’s pretty—the utility side of the house and that’s usually the worst side too because usually the way it’s done, it’s not sealed in. The pipes are open back there. You get the sideways rain that runs down the house, gets in around the area a little bit at a time, and attracts bugs.

So it’s good to get it all buttoned up and dry. Yep. Dried in. So it’s good too. I’m looking at things to put on the punch list for the painter as we’re looking at this again. Places under there where they didn’t get paint and some in the front. Yeah. And the punch list. He’ll be here Monday. Yeah. Yep. All right. All right.

Dave Browne: ‘You wanna ask questions or you want us to just talk?’
Mark Tasker: ‘I want you to talk and I’ll ask a question if I have one.’
Tammy Tasker: ‘Okay. All right. You’re the verbose person, you start.’
Mark Tasker: ‘Hi, we’re Mark and Tammy and we have had db Home Improvements do all the siding and most of the windows in our house. The crew has been amazing. The work has been superb. We would highly recommend them to anybody. We’re just so pleased. The guys—and I think we should mention them because they’re just special. Adam’s the supervisor, Ron, Ethan, Andy—all good guys. We love what they’ve done to our house. They’re special people. They’ve also made us feel more comfortable in our house because we did have a lot of rot that needed to be repaired and they were very meticulous about making sure that that rot was repaired. It was repaired properly so we can sleep better. They did a good job. Everyone sleeps and we’re happy.’

Dave Browne: ‘That’s right. We need five-star reviews. Everyone sleeps and then we don’t have issues. Right. Yeah. Right.’
Tammy Tasker: ‘It’s been a good job. They’re very friendly. They’re just, they’re a great crew. They work well together and even our neighbors have said, ‘those guys that work on your house, they’re having a good time and they’re working hard.’ But they enjoy what they’re doing. Right. Did you say something about a wand?’
Mark Tasker: ‘Oh yes, Ron has a magic wand that he’s had to pull out for me. He’ll be looking at something and I’ll go ‘sharpen your magic wand.’ The stuff he does to fix our house has been great. He does. He has a magic wand.’

Dave Browne: ‘All right. That’s fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I have your—Thank you for working on our house. All right, there we go. Okay, now we’re on. The house has lots of dormers and we can see in the front here, there’s four windows and the amount of detail that goes around those windows is quite amazing. And so the guys did it right. You can see that there’s plank in between every one of the frames around the windows, ends up looking very nice, very complete. And again, it’s that kind of attention to detail that I think separates the company from others. Right. That’s great curb appeal. See that pulling in. Yeah. This is a boring wall. Yeah, but this is the Allen Pert and garage wall cause that’s where Mark’s shop is. He makes sawdust in there. Yeah. But he also makes other cool stuff. Yeah, I went to small, just framing around it and not doing the kind of detail where there’s planks everywhere. I think again, that just goes, shows the detail of the work and it makes it look much more complete than it would have been if they just—somebody framed a box around it. It does, yeah. And it’s mechanically better. You know, if you box it out, leave the old siding there—that’s just where rot’s gonna get in. Yeah, that’s where they get in. That’s where it’s getting in. Yeah, I already did that. Been there, done that.’

Mark Tasker: ‘When you’re gonna do a project like this, I think it’s very important to take a look at the sort of other things that you need done to your house. And if you get it all done at the same time, then it’s not a piecemeal job and there’s no cutting and pasting. It’s really then becomes a very seamless integration to the rest of the house.’

Dave Browne: ‘What you’re describing real well is what we call rework. You keep going at it and going at it and put the patch, put the repair. And then please don’t touch it because we’ll clean it right back to clean and then get it seamless, mechanically correct.’

Mark Tasker: ‘I have to—well—it was my wife who made sure that we did these things all at once. So I give her great credit for that. But do make sure that if you’ve got work that needs to be done, now’s the time to get it done. I learned. You can put this on here if you’d like: I will never recommend a window replacement company to anybody ever again. Because you don’t know what’s around the window and the window replacement companies don’t fix that stuff. We had one where they needed to repair it—well, they said, ‘well, you got to get someone in to do it.’ The window company, because they didn’t have anyone. They didn’t want anybody to—they didn’t want to spend their time repairing some rot. Well, they didn’t want anyone who knew what they were doing. So you have to get somebody right away and your window’s out already. But when that was a problem and then they really didn’t do a good job. So the siding is much like roofing, the watershed in any parts of the house. So the overlap of the roofing, of course, is the bottom up so the water doesn’t run in. So any windows or any odd spots around the house, if there’s repairs done, makeshift repairs done, and it’s like this or like that, the water’s gonna run in. So everything has to be like that—overlap with flashing.'”