Such a pretty surface, such a mess underneath.
I'm running into this a lot lately. Things look clean in our bedroom, but I'm pretending I don't know what's stuffed in our spare closet. The girls claimed they've cleaned their rooms, but their drawers and shelves are a mess.
A friend of mine did a remodel on her house a little while ago and basically got every homeowner's worst fear. When they pulled off the old siding to re-do, they found massive structural damage. Mold, water damage, rotting wood. Yes, it was good that they found it. It all got taken care of, and the final product is beautiful. But it was a massive increase in time and money, and had them terrified, for a long time, of what else might be lurking underneath.
Frankly, it had - has - me scared too. Doing home improvement is terrifying. When the carpet people came to replace our family room carpet, I was thinking all too clearly about the fact that this carpet had been laid down in 1994 and not touched since. We had no idea what the floor underneath looked like. The company we'd purchased from warned us that their people couldn't do any structural repair, nor could they lay new flooring on a damaged sub floor. If something was wrong, we'd need to deal with it. I stood there as they scored and removed the old carpet and pad thinking please be ok, please be ok, please be ok.
It was ok. Super dusty, but ok. And now it's lovely.
But you just never know. And it's not limited to home improvement. It could be anything. You hear about couples who fall apart and think "what? Them? Really?" They were great! They were fine! But there was mess underneath.
You can be a health mess underneath.
A financial mess underneath.
An emotional mess underneath.
And until you pull back the surface (or someone forces it back) you might never know. If our friends hadn't decided they wanted new siding - which was more an esthetic choice than an upkeep one - they might have lived with problems festering away in their walls for years, getting worse and worse.
So take the cover off every now and then, if you can, and know exactly what you're dealing with.
