I live on an inside corner so the side of my neighbor's house faces partially the front of mine.
He had tan brick on the first floor and brown aluminmum siding on the second floor, and then put in a set of floodlights high on the side of the house, and they ran the wires across and up the side of the house using raw aluminum conduit. It looks terrible, like what one sees on a warehouse.
Is there any sort of brown conduit that could have been used? Or any other method to run the wire?
Now he is thinking of redoing the aluminum siding with vinyl siding, either brown again or cream color, you might call it. Not cream that is dark white but cream that is like coffee with a lot of cream, light tan** The conduit will have to be detached to do this, and replacing it with something else won't be that hard. I'd even pay for the materials, if I have to.
Is there any cream-colored conduit or other method he could use if he chooses cream?
Thanks
**Why are there two different colors called cream? And what the heck is taupe?
When I put a floodlight in, the wires didn't show at all. They went into the attic and connected to the AC I had run to the unfinished attic.
*If he gets new siding, the conduit may be able to be installed behind the vinyl. He should talk to a siding company and an electrician about this. The conduit could have been painted before it was installed.
It should have been painted before it was put up. Slip the connectors on first so the mating surfaces do not get painted. When I put the lights in my screen cage I built the whole conduit system, painted it bronze on the ground and then put it up. There was a little touch up after it was done but it was minimal. If he is siding it, paint the conduit first, then put up the siding. That way you don't care about the background while you are painting.
I believe that there are spray cans available of touch up paint for the more common colors of siding, as well as the same brown tone that is used for gutters...
He probably doesn't care or I wouldn't have to do his thinking for him.
He's rather a jerk, which is why I'm asking here whether it can be done before suggesting it to him. It's probably also why I'm complaining about him here now, so I'll get out my annoyance here and be nicer to him when I suggst this.
I'm so stupid, it didn't occur to me to google "colored conduit", although to be fair to myself, the phrase wasn't in my mind until I wrote my OP.
Great idea but they dont' have cream or even brown. White they have but that might look bad too.
Ricod, no way I would pay all that, for the wires to be internal. It was easy in my case, because I'd already run power to the attic, for ceiling fixtures in 2 of the bedrooms, lights I use all the time. So I also have a light in the attic, and an electric outlet for the radio or tv, or an antenna amp (for the inside-attic antenna, which is close enough it shouldn't need an amp, but I'll know if it helps within a week or so.)
If I hadn't had the power in the attic, I would have skipped the floodlights until I had it. I wouldn't even put brown conduit on the side of a brown house unless there was a rush need for an iron lung upstairs. (It did take a long time to drill the hole in the plywood between the first and second floor in the area surrounding the main heating duct. I had to lie on plywood placed on the attic trusses and reach my arm down with a 6 foot drill bit and a one foot extension, and then the drill bit bent a lot of the time. If I had it to do over, I'd make sure that was the first hole I drilled with it; maybe it was.
Hmmm. I should have run the drill bit through a 6' piece of plastic conduit, to keep it from bending much. What a great idea, that took me 26 years to think of.
Don't take this too hard, but I'm glad I don't live next to anyone so picky that a single run of conduit on the side of MY house would bother them this much... What are you going to do if he puts up a color of siding you don't like? :)
Okay. I'm not. Seriously, I appreciate your opening.
It's not just that. The other post lists the things he's done to make his house ugly. He's also improved it in other ways, but all in all it looks worse. Actually, the current siding looks fine except in one piece, 14" wide by 8 feet high, where the wind blew a section partly off. He hired someone cheap to repair it, and the guy put in 8 screws at almost random places to attach it again. Also one of the decorative straps that holds the downspout in place must have gotten ruined, so the guy replaced it with some 1" wide metal with a hole every inch. That really looks like crap, but he sees that more than I do.
He's doing that too. But I've lost that battle already. ONe of my favorite neighbors put up cream-colored siding, and even if she weren't a favorite, it's up already. He's going for the same color.
He also put up a stockade fence around his backyard that blocks my view down all the back yards past him. I don't think he built it on the property line either, but I don't mean the property line he shares with me.
The fence was probably cheap because a couple big sections of pickets have fallen off as the wood dries, I guess. I found one about four feet long and one or two inches wide at the wide end and brought it to him and told him either I think this came from your fence, or This came from your fence. He said, No, it didn't, and he didn't want the piece.
He also had bagworms on his fir trees and wouldn't do anything about them for 18 months, even though they were spreading to my fir trees. He ignored my first two complaints and finally told me, They don't spread that way. As if he knows.
He also thinks he owns about 60 square feet that I own, and told me to stop mowing it on one occasion. We were supposed to both go look at the plat, to see who owned it. He showed no interest in doing this together. I checked again but he either didn't or managed to convince himself it said he did. When I wrote him three letters on the topic, he didn't even acknowledge getting them. I don't need anything from him on this, but acknowledging receipt would have been nice. There's no rush on this one, and after I do a little more work on the topic, the next letter will include copies of the first three and be certified, return-receipt.
I've left out 2 or 3 things that are too complicated.
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