FLICKER DAMAGE

It’s always something, you know. If you own your house – and even if you don’t – it’s always something with the abode.

 Tap tap tap. Tappity-tap-tap-tap. TAP TAP TAP. Tappity-tap.

Mike tools leather on a sturdy table in the east dormer, so I thought nothing of the tapping. He had gone upstairs, turned on the radio, and the tapping commenced. I thought he had finished the current project, but the sequence of events was so logical that I didn’t question it. I was sure he was tapping away at his work table. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. Then – while the tapping continued -- I heard him get up and walk down the hall. Pondering the feasibility of tapping and walking, I concluded that Mike wasn’t the source of the tapping. And that meant just one thing . . .

“Were you tapping?” I asked as he descended the stairs. No, he hadn’t been tapping, he said. And just then the tapping started again.

“Okay,” I said, “we have a problem.” We moved to the kitchen and identified the sound as coming from the northwest corner of the house in the vicinity of the kitchen porch.

“Maybe it’s the water tank,” Mike said hopefully. “No,” I said. The three of us made several stealthy trips to investigate without seeing anything -- perhaps because we didn’t want to see anything. Finally, I literally crept out the kitchen door and just caught sight of the flicker as it winged away. Then we saw the damage at the end of the porch.

 

But that wasn’t all. We next discovered flicker damage on an unexposed board on the front porch.

Two years ago we hired Bi-State Siding out of Lewiston to cover much of the exposed wood on the farmhouse. We didn’t cover those areas that we thought would be inaccessible. Well, we were wrong to think they were inaccessible. “There’s no such thing as ‘can’t get,’” my mother used to say.

 

On our last trip to town, Mike re-visited Bi-State Siding. The flickers are good for business, they told him, especially in the vicinity of Dworshak Dam, and of course, we aren’t far from there “as the flicker flies.” But the company doesn’t keep records, so we have to match our trim color again before we can buy more siding. KW