It’s funny. When Tyler and I bought this house, I didn’t mind the vinyl siding. Everybody says how low maintenance it is.
No painting like traditional wood – just hose it off once in a while and you’re good. Ideal for young kids and busy parents, right? But then our first hail storm hit Kannapolis last year and I saw our neighbour’s vinyl siding crack easier than an eggshell from a baseball-sized piece of hail.
Crack down the middle like you would expect wood to or some other high-end siding to. That started my mild obsession with finding something else.
Our siding situation is a Frankenstein monster of exterior cladding options.
We have some original wood siding on the rear of the house. Vinyl siding covers the front and sides. Then, the homeowners before us decided they really liked exposed aluminium flashing so about 5 feet below the roof line on the carport side of the house there’s this mysterious substance that I believe may be aluminium flashing.
If someone opened up a museum of things you should never use for exterior home cladding, ours would be the featured display home. Mason thinks our house is hilarious calling it our “patchwork house.” Patchwork because….well….yeah. Fast forward one year after the hail storm.
The vinyl siding is already losing its bright white colour on the southern exposure of our home. After just THREE YEARS. Touch it and some chalky white residue comes off on your hand.
Don’t get me started on what happened to it last winter when we had that ice storm. How did sections of our siding just crack/buckle as I was looking out like…ugh. I started researching other options because let’s be honest – I’m OVER our house looking like a dingy rental.
Now before you get all judgy – we don’t have $20k to drop on siding material. But what if there was something out there that cost more upfront but would hold up better over time AND made our house look decent? Enter –fibre cement siding.
The leading brand is James Hardie but there are others. Fibre cement (or fibre, depending on where you’re from) siding is a mix of cement, sand, and wood fibres. It sounds super boring.
But truthfully it looks leaps and bounds better than vinyl and is rated to last decades and decades. My sister- in-law has it on her house in Charlotte and after FOUR YEARS it looks brand new. Homes all across North Carolina are beating it with ice storms, horrible summers, and freak snow storms and it’s holding up great.
If you’ve ever seen something get knocked on vinyl siding you know that thing is going to crack. Not so with fibre cement siding. Mason has got really into baseball this year and I’ve watched that ball bounce off our neighbour’s Hardie board siding at least a dozen times.
If that were vinyl… JACK-HOLE. Vinyl can’t hold a paint job like fibre cement can either. Seriously you’ll repaint fibre cement and only have to do it every twenty years.
Vinyl starts chalking and looks dingy in what, five? The down side is…it costs more. Like, way more.
We got prices back last autumn when I was pregnant and delusional thinking I might actually get this done before baby number two arrives and fibre cement was triple what we would have spent on vinyl siding replacement. It’s also harder to install because they need special tools to cut it (due to dust issues) and it’s heavier so sometimes you have to reinforce the wall before installation. Not really a weekend project when you’re eight months pregnant and your preschooler’s idea of helping is giving you the wrong screw while you’re on a ladder.
But…I did the math. And if you factor in repaints and maintenance costs over…let’s say… TWENTY YEARS. Fibre cement really isn’t THAT crazy pricey.
Vinyl will need replaced in fifteen-twenty years if you’re lucky. Assuming we don’t have another hail storm – but if we do – vinyl needs replaced AGAIN. Fibre cement comes with 50 year warranties.
Everwood siding was another option I kept seeing. This isn’t your grandparents wood siding that seemed to rot if it got wet for too long. The technology of creating wood composites has got pretty dang good.
They’re still stands out there that manufacture engineered wood siding and the most common brand I see is called LP SmartSide. It looks like wood. Like actual wood you’d see on a traditional home.
It doesn’t have that plastic look and feel like vinyl siding. I really liked this option because A) it looks like wood and B) it’s much easier to install yourself than something like fibre cement. It can be cut with normal tools, it’s lighter in weight, and if Tyler and I ever decided we wanted to tackle some of it ourselves, we wouldn’t have to purchase special tools/safety masks to install it.
It’s also cheaper than fibre cement and yet MUCH more durable than vinyl siding. Also – if you hit it, engineered wood siding flexes where fibre cement will crack. Kids will be kids and they will throw balls at your house whether you like it or not.
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Also paint lasts a lot longer before you start to see that chalky degradation like you do with vinyl. There are some other newer options that are STUNNING but WAY out of our budget. Those architectural panel systems give you such a clean, sharp look – some are metal, some are high-end composites.
They’re installed with an air gap behind them which is suppose to help with insulation and moisture problems. Love it, but do we really need to spend that kind of money on siding? Not yet.
If I had to guess, we’d do something like Everwood siding. I feel like too many of our neighbours have tried the fibre cement look and I just don’t want our house to stick out like a sore thumb. Also – we could start with the front of the house and do sections as we’re able to save money.
Front of house would drastically increase our kerb appeal and then work on the sides later. Also…we live in North Carolina. Hurricanes aren’t super common but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen.
Plus we get freezing temps, ice storms, hot-humid summers, thunderstorms with hail, and the occasional hurricane brushes through. All of these things have touched NC and beat up our siding in the past. Vinyl has not withstood our southern climate well, at least from what I see in our neighbourhood.
Engineered woods are MADE for this type of changing/inconsistent climate. Why does install matter? Well if you go with vinyl siding you can space your boards about eight inches apart if you screw up and they’ll probably still look okay.
You can have some panels installed level and others a little off and it’s not the end of the world. Want to install a little too tight or too loose and you might have bubbling paint or buckling panels. The nicer the material you use for siding, the more precise you have to be during installation.
Can we install our own siding? Perhaps aspens we could do part of it. Tyler’s a handy man – we’ve done other projects.
But like I said above – if you mess up in areas, you’ll REALLY notice. We could probably handle installing some of the straightforward sections and hire professionals for the trickier areas. Like around windows and corners.
We’ll have to really dive into cost and logistics if we decide to go this route. Price points as of last autumn when I did this research (y’all – I kid you NOT…I have spreadsheets for this stuff): Vinyl replacement for entire home would be around $8k. Engineered wood was going to be $12-13k.
Fibre cement would be around $16k. LOVE LOVE LOVE me some of those architectural panels and they run north of $20k. Our ENTIRE HOUSE down payment was $15k….so yeah – we have some decisions to make.
But what if we think long-term instead of just what fits in our budget right now. We plan to be in this house until both kiddos are in school at least and realistically will be here much longer than that. Factor in ten-fifteen years and what’s the real cost difference between vinyl and something that may last longer before you need to redo it?
Paint touch ups every few years vs. COMPLETE replacement of your home’s skin. Quality versus quantity.
And you know what else? IEITHER ME WHEN PEOPLE COME OVER AND NOTICE HOW UGLY THE FRONT OF MY HOUSE IS. Don’t get me wrong.
We’ve put tons of work and effort into making this house a home. It’s the outside that’s holding us back from having our home truly match our style/effort we’ve put into it. Don’t judge me.
I just want my house to look as good as it feels on the inside. So right now the plan is saving – saving – saving until we have enough to start this endeavour. Ideally we’d like to start in the Spring once this babe is over his initial newborn phase.
Maybe fibre cement for the high impact areas of the house (exposed to worse weather) and engineered wood for the body of the house.
It won’t happen overnight but at least we have a game plan! What I love about doing my research is that the siding industry has really come a long way from the good ole’ days of vinyl siding, wood siding, and brick being your only options.
Sure those are always going to be around but now we have other options that will truly stand the test of time. And they’re not so ridiculously expensive that the average-Joe family will never be able to afford them. We just have to be smarter about what we spend our money on/trade offs than the generation before us that slapped vinyl on every surface and called it a day.
Ok phew. I think that about covers where we stand on our never-ending siding project. For now, we’re still stuck with vinyl siding across most of our home but hey – at least I have a plan to get it taken care of.
And PS – Mason hasn’t called our house the “ugly house” since I painted our front door. Progress, people. Progress.
