Vinyl Siding: It's Not ALL Bad

As I said in a previous post, if given the time and the money, my husband and I would be thrilled to be able to replace the vinyl siding on our house with period-appropriate wood siding, complete with all of the standard Victorian intricacies. Unfortunately, that's not in the budget right now, so we've made do with what we have. At the time we bought the house, it had been sided 6 or 7 years prior. It wasn't in terrible shape and we actually liked the color. We painted the front porch, hung some shutters and pretty much called it finito, as far as the exterior was concerned. The one thing that we did consider doing was replacing the siding on the upper-most peak of the front of the house with half-round (or scalloped) siding in a coordinating color. We figured doing this would restore some of the Victorian charm to the house. But, as with many, many things we have "considered" for this house, it didn't NEED to be done and so it didn't get done. Then fate stepped in...

A couple of months ago we had a pretty bad wind storm. (Can you see where I'm going with this?) No rain, just wind. Nonetheless, there was some minor damage around town and when we got home that day we found that about a quarter of the siding on that top peak had blown right off. Even the insulation board underneath the siding had come off in some places. (And actually hit our neighbor, no less! But that's a different story...) We immediately called our homeowners insurance agent to start a claim. But, because it was the weekend, we had to wait to talk to someone and all the while the wind kept right on blowing. To make a long story short, we ended up losing over 50% of the siding on the top peak. We were the only house on the street - in the neighborhood, even - that this happened to. Shoddy workmanship? Probably. The siding wasn't the only issue we've had with some of the "new" elements of the house. Coincidentally, all of this new work was done by the same company. We decided to give them a call. Not that we were expecting much from them at this point, but we figured that at the very least they should be called out on their crappy work. Well, my husband couldn't even get them to return his call until he pretended to be a new client. Miraculously, Mr. New Client got a call back immediately. Mike and Danielle are still waiting for their return call. After a lengthy and uncomfortable phone conversation, the company basically told us in no uncertain terms that they wouldn't be doing anything to help and 7 years is apparently the shelf life of vinyl siding. Okayyyyyyyyyyyyy.

And so, we got our insurance claim money and my wonderful husband repeatedly climbed up a very intimidating 35 foot ladder to hang our new Cedar Impressions by Certainteed half-round siding (in Cypress) all by himself. And now our house looks like this:

Can't complain, even if it IS vinyl. Oh, and by the way...YOU SUCK, CAMPBELL BROTHERS!!!