I Was a Vinyl Siding Snob

Okay, I admit it.  When we lived inland, I hated vinyl siding.  I thought it was tacky.  But after 10 years of living along the coast, I've changed my tune.  It's starting to seem pretty fabulous to me!

You see, salt water wreaks havoc on wood.  It's a maintenance nightmare.  And while I like the look of real wood, it's a lot of work every few years: scrape, sand, paint, repeat. It's a lot of work, and there are much better things to do with your time!

I know there are options out there.  On our own house, we used something called cementitious siding (weird word, I know).  It's essentially siding that has a cement core (and it weighs a ton!). Supposedly, it doesn't need paint for 15 years, but we've heard from other people that they had to paint their house in half that time.  And once you start painting it, the whole scrape, sand, paint, repeat cycle starts all over again.

And interestingly, the National Association of Realtors just published a survey on the Best and Worst Home Remodeling Projects  and vinyl siding was near the top of the list.  Why?  Low maintenance is something that everyone wants!

Houselogic - National Association of Realtors

Individual Cedar Shake Panel

Source:  Certainteed

So, when it came time to look at siding for the Beach Cottage, we decided to use vinyl siding (which is on the bottom half of the house already).  We have no idea when the original siding was put on the house, but it's in such nice shape, we think it's pretty recent. Since it would be impossible to match the color exactly, we're going with a slightly different product on the upper half of the house.  Cedar Impressions is a newer product that looks remarkably like cedar shakes, but is actually vinyl.  It's roughly 2.5X the cost of plain old vinyl, but we think it's worth it.  We had a neighbor stop by while walking her dog this week and she kept asking about the cedar shingles and wouldn't believe they were vinyl until one of the guys from Exterior Alterations showed her a panel!




But before the siding could go on, the guys had to finish the window trim.  We were all really impressed with how nice the wide, white moldings looked around the windows.  See the difference here between the large windows on the left, vs the untrimmed one on the right?  They really make it pop!  We already think it looks pretty great, but they'll be dressed up even more once we install the brackets.

Brackets are painted and ready to be installed

Thanks to Mother Nature, the siding project is going a bit slowly (too cold and it snaps….and if it's not cold, it seems to be snowing!  What a winter!).  But you can already see how nice it's starting to look!  What do you think?  Tacky or low maintenance??

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