Thoughts on Wood Siding

When I was about 15, I woke to my radio alarm one morning and the top news was a house fire just outside the city. I remember it was extremely cold that day, probably -20C. I couldn’t fathom escaping your house in the middle of the night, in pitch black, in those temperatures.

It turned out that the house fire was that of my softball teammate, Cheryl, aka “Barbie” (she was adorably cute). The big drama that morning was the fact that her house was “all wood!” I didn’t quite understand that. Did they live in a cabin? What did that mean? What is my house made out of? Why did Cheryl live in a wooden house? I thought they could afford something better, I mean, they had horses!

Unlike my juvenile thoughts, traditional building materials, such as wood, does not necessitate low-quality. My dad built 4 of our homes, new, and renovated one, and they were overbuilt to say the least. I can’t say all the materials were top-of-the-line, sustainable, or even safe for our health as we understand VOCs  now (volatile organic compounds that contribute to that “new” smell in cars and homes). However, because he used modern building materials, it started to send the message that wood was not a sound building material. It only furthered my bias that we lived in each home a few years before we moved to the next. There wasn’t exactly a point of decay reached, or even ongoing maintenance. The last tree would be planted and suddenly we were on to the next house.

Their current house was a builder-built home, and I helped to hammer in extra subfloor during the build. This was also confusing as a teenager to me. Why wouldn’t builders add enough subfloor? Why did we have to go in after-hours and fix their mistakes? Were builders evil? (Yes, yes they are). But moreover, I assumed that all houses must be built shoddily if my own pa didn’t build them.

On a side note I have learned that this sneaky upgrade behavior is now verboten. You would likely be in breach of your contract and very few builders allow you to write in DIY improvements anymore.

And so I correlated the unmaintained wood siding inner city homes as being shoddy simply because of their materials, not because of the lack of homeowner TLC. I saw new suburban homes as being better. Alas, many are not. And many old homes built during an economic boom cycle, or even those built during a bust, or post-industrial era, are shoddy. It varies house by house. Wood as a building material though, it does not necessitate poor quality.

Just as homes built with stucco or vinyl age, and the same neglect befalls them, they too can be eyesores. It isn’t just the materials you use for your home but a play between the materials, the upkeep and the aesthetics used in the original architecture.

Our 1905 house has old-growth cedar drop siding, beveled as seen below. In Calgary, this is rare tongue-in-groove siding that has a decorative and functional feature to it for shedding rain and adding the much-needed depth so that the house doesn’t resemble four flat walls with a peak at the top. Wood alone always adds depth to the eye but the decorative and functional beveling gives greater depth, and concurrently, greater beauty. It was a Victorian house, and even the most modest Victorian house took into account aesthetics along with function.

Then, somewhere down the line, in the same period that they installed a drop ceiling in the kitchen, morgue-like lighting fixtures, vinyl tile and metal nosing to interior stairs, the homeowners also put Aluminum over the entire wood siding. They added thin foam sheets between the old and new sidings for a very minor insulating factor that is laughable in r-values. This would not have been cheap to replace many of the original antique glass windows with unopening aluminum, bland windows. In fact, aluminum is more costly than vinyl. This was done from an aesthetic that favours longterm low-maintenance and function. Just as my neighbor created his entire backyard into mulch to reduce maintenance (and I’ve seen this done also with concrete for the entire backyard), there may be a few people who appreciate it, but they do so from a functional standpoint more than aesthetically (I hope!).

The house itself is very plain in architecture, as Victorian houses were all in the details. The aluminum hides what was once a decorative feature beneath the front dormer of the house, facing the street. Without a more complex architectural design, and void now of any siding detail, the house becomes void of beauty and lackluster.

Do you see on the front dormer above the window?

An old photo of the house showed something like fishscales (below)in the space between the window and the roofline. With a plain Victorian/Gothic vernacular architecture such as ours, the fish scales would have added a lot of value.

And see the windows? They have no frame above them. The Aluminum siding and the windows meet at the top and sides with no frame (casing). This is not only functionally poor quality by allowing rain to hit the window, but it is akin to beautiful hair on a woman. It frames the face and adds to her beauty.

 I sometimes see an old home in my area now covered in vinyl. The original architecture is still so impressive that perhaps it would look better in the original wood, but I find it hard to fault an owner to do away with painting and dealing with lead paint from 1910. There are aspects to wood that people don’t want to deal with, such as the lead paint, the ongoing painting, and perhaps, the association that I had growing up that wood was of lesser quality than a synthetic material.

While house-hunting, we would see an old house outfitted with a synthetic material over or replacing original wood siding and assume it was an infill. You would walk inside and have this cognitive dissonance between a modernist, bright red, stucco siding on the outside and practically gas light fixtures inside. It doesn’t give a cohesive look and offends the sense of what should be. Like seeing new McDonald’s restaurants suddenly having black-painted stucco on the outside. It’s so chic I almost want to go in. But of course, the same old fries and chicken fingers await me, quelle horror!

For wood, the spray painting techniques these days make me wonder how it is changing the aesthetics of wood. Sure, it’s also much quicker than hand-painting but sometimes I have to look really closely to tell if a home is vinyl or wood, especially in an older neighbourhood where vinyl has become de rigueur over wood siding. Some spray painted wood houses seem to hide what was once the character of the wood. It is too smooth, not enough depth to give that wood-look. In fact, I was assured during our paint quote that the paint would fill in the gaps where nail holes were. Perhaps it fills in too well the wood grains?

Yet proponents of wood siding will tell you that wood is unmistakable, better and gentler on the environment even accounting for any noxious paint fumes, sanding of lead paint that is unavoidable, and this occurring once every 5-10 years. It is hard to know the real truth.

Either way, we had our circa-60s Aluminum siding pummeled and done from a huge hail storm this August. Even the eavestroughs were smooshed by the stomp of Mother Nature.

We are left with a decision, whether to replace the Aluminum (a bad choice in hail storm Inglewood!), an alternative siding, or restore that original wood.

The original wood is in decent shape and will need to be thoroughly prepped from years of neglect, even pre-aluminum siding days when no one painted it regularly. It is no wonder an owner saw the wood as ugly because it was plainly neglected. I saw maybe a few layers of paint for what would have been 70 years of life. Not enough. Luckily we can recycle the aluminum.

Holes from where insulation was once blown in to wall cavities from the outside will need to be filled, nail holes filled, rotted pieces replaced. It will need to be power-washed, sanded, and repainted. The windows will need to be fixed where they may have rotted or in other cases, they were replaced and left bare without so much as casing or a window sill. The parts of a window were not only more aesthetically pleasing; they served a function for pushing rain away from the windows! The aluminum shutters will need to be replaced with the real deal. It is no small job.

To summarize our choices:

·         We could remove the aluminum then insulate and wrap our wood siding in cement board siding. This will make the house warmer, and lower the maintenance issues associated with wood. Yet wood siding experts will say that this can create problems leaving the original wood on because moisture can seep underneath the new siding and rot your wood, doing terrible damage unseen from the outside. My counterpoint is that Calgary is so dry that if it hasn’t already happened in the last 50 years, I doubt it will in the future. Counter to my point is that we will be adding even better insulation, increasing the condensation potential. Retrofitting old houses with modern insulation and vapour barrier ideas requires careful consideration.

·         Altnernatively, we could remove the aluminum and foam insulation and go about restoring the original cedar. Any money left over could be put towards removing the asbestos r-5 insulation in the attic and replacing it will much better insulation to recover any losses from the laughable insulation properties of “thin foam” and aluminum (ie. None).

Some very serious downsides to the wood siding restoration include:

·         Preparing our wood includes sanding and will definitely put lead paint dust into the air, the soil, our neighbors’ yards, windows and soil/grass.

·         Lesser so, the paint spray itself being environmental pollution.

 

Photo Source:

http://ocriblecoblis.blogspot.ca