As an interior designer with an eye for the nitty-gritty, Mari Leonard was dead-set against siding the frame portion of her 1926 Evanston bungalow. “I thought if I sided it, I would lose the details,” she says.
But her husband, who had been doing the scraping and painting himself about every five years, was tired of the upkeep and didn’t want to shell out big bucks to a professional painter.
“We were having such arguments over having to side it,” she recalls.
Leonard and her husband are exactly the folks manufacturers have in mind for their new lines of restoration siding and trim designed to maintain the historic look of older homes. In the end, Leonard found a contractor who specializes in the new materials and the couple went ahead with the siding job.
She wasn’t sorry. “I think it looks fantastic,” Leonard says. “I’m really glad we decided to do it. It was well worth it in the time, money savings and relationship savings between my husband and myself,” she says.
The improved appearance of today’s vinyl siding is the main reason it has all but obliterated the market for aluminum siding, which experts say accounts for less than 10 percent of siding in Chicago today. (Aluminum is still used for window trim, soffits and fascia, however.)
Vinyl siding also is more resilient than it used to be, making it less likely to shatter or crack. And it is more rigid, making it less likely to buckle or bend.
In addition, the color permeates the vinyl, so it won’t chip off.
But for owners of older homes concerned about aesthetics, perhaps the biggest improvement is the development of more colors, wood-grain patterns and trim choices.
Contractors single out CertainTeed’s Wolverine line plus Alside and Alcoa’s restoration lines as helping to improve vinyl siding’s image.
Instead of just being a way to eliminate the chore of painting, some vinyl siding contractors see the materials as a way to improve the home’s appearance. The secret is in the trim and detail work.
Using special corner posts, fish-scale tiles, beaded wainscoting, diamond-shaped accents, latticework and other decorative trim, “you can really restore an older home and have it look nice,” says Jim Wilson, president of Wilson Colonial in Lake Zurich. “It used to be when you sided a house, you would lose the trim lines. Now you can get the trim lines back.”
The materials have improved so much that Greg Bednarski, president of Siding Group in Deerfield and Chicago, who did Leonard’s job, suggests onlookers can’t tell a house is sided with vinyl.
“In Chicago, a lot of really nice houses were destroyed with aluminum and asphalt siding,” Bednarski says. “They covered all the trim work. Trim work is what makes a house attractive.”
It also can ring up the total cost of a siding job by as much as 30 percent more, acknowledges Bednarski, who has won awards for his restoration siding work.
While he believes “95 percent of siding projects don’t look as attractive as the original wood siding,” Bednarski says he can make a frame house look better sided than it did painted.
The ticket, he explains, lies in how you handle the details. He has studied the types of elements used to create the exterior of Victorian homes and Chicago farmhouses, and learned how to replicate them in vinyl and aluminum. He points to four elements that can make your vinyl-sided house a standout.
– Add a border of trim, a frieze board custom-made out of aluminum, at the bottom of your house where the frame meets the foundation.
– Build out your window trim to set it off from the siding. Too often, Bednarski says, window trim gets lost.
– Add detail by installing a frieze board where the top overhangs on your house meet the wall.
– Accentuate the corner posts by making them larger and using a contrasting trim color. Don’t try to make them blend in with siding.
– Coordinate colors to draw out the detail. Too often people are afraid to mix colors because they can’t picture what it will look like, Bednarski says. Using more than one color increases the odds that people won’t focus on the siding itself. When picking colors, look at them outside and at several different times of day.
– When choosing siding itself, avoid panels with prominent wood grains. Instead choose those with flat surfaces, which more closely resemble painted boards.
But looks aren’t everything. Proper installation and durability are paramount to a long-lasting siding job. It takes a trained worker to install siding correctly.
