Premium Services Group

Do you do siding and windows?

Yes, as part of exterior work alongside roofing. On older New England houses these tend to be found together, because whatever let water in rarely stopped at one place: a window that failed ten years ago shows up as rot in the sheathing behind the siding. It is worth having the whole exterior looked at rather than replacing one element and hoping.

Why these come as a set

Water arrives at a house from above and from the side, and it leaves by whichever route it finds first. Nothing about that route respects the line between one trade and another.

A roof sheds water onto a wall. The wall sheds it past windows and doors. Every one of those transitions is a detail that either works or does not, and when one fails the damage shows up somewhere else entirely. A head flashing missing above a window puts water into the wall below it, where it runs down the face of the sheathing behind perfectly good-looking siding until it reaches something horizontal. That is often the sill of the window underneath, or the band at the bottom of the wall, or the framing at the corner.

Which is why the answer to "can you just do the siding" is usually another question: what is the siding covering, and how do you know?

A window that failed ten years ago shows up as rot in the sheathing behind the siding.

What is found when the siding comes off

On a house of a certain age, some or all of the following, and none of them are unusual.

No water-resistive barrier at all, or building paper that has torn and slid. No flashing over window and door heads, because for a long time nobody used any. Sheathing that is soft at the bottom of a wall or under a window. A previous repair done from the outside, where somebody caulked a joint instead of flashing it. Rot at a corner, where two walls meet and nothing was lapped. Insulation that has been wet and is no longer insulating anything. Occasionally, structural framing that has gone, which turns a cladding job into something else.

The important part is not that this happens; it is how it is handled. That means it gets shown to you with photographs, you are told what it changes in time and cost, and you get the decision — before the wall is closed back up. And it means the paperwork says in advance how additional sheathing or framing is priced, so the conversation when it is found is about the work rather than about the number.

The order matters more than the materials

Windows go in before siding. That is not a preference, it is how the layers lap.

A window installed into a properly prepared opening has a sill pan under it, flashing at the jambs, flashing over the head, and each of those tucked under the water-resistive barrier above and over the one below, so that anything that gets in runs back out. Install the siding first and then cut a window into it, and you are relying on sealant to do a job that lapping should be doing. Sealant has a service life. Lapping does not.

The same applies where siding meets a roof, a deck ledger, a chimney or a lower roof's flashing. Doing these out of order does not always leak immediately. It leaks in about eight years, which is long enough that nobody connects the two events.

What belongs in the written scope

The water barrier: What goes on the sheathing, how it is lapped, and how it is integrated with the roof above and the foundation below. Named, not implied.
Flashing, by location: Heads, sills, jambs, corners, the deck ledger, where a roof meets a wall. Ask for the list. This is the part that quietly disappears from a low bid.
Rotten sheathing and framing: How it is handled and how it is priced, agreed before anyone opens a wall rather than negotiated once the wall is open.
Trim details: What happens at corners, around windows, at the bottom of the wall, and where the siding meets the roof. Trim is where a re-side looks either finished or approximate.
The interior: Who patches plaster, who repaints, who resets a blind or a curtain rail. New windows almost always mean some interior work, and it is frequently nobody's job because nobody wrote it down.
Debris and the ground: Disposal named in the scope, the garden protected, and a magnet run for nails at the end. If a bid does not mention it, ask where it went.

Old houses have opinions, and so do towns

A house built before the war was not detailed the way a house built last year is, and the honest approach is to respect what it is rather than to wrap a modern assembly around it and hope.

Older walls were built to dry out. Sealing one up tightly from the outside without thinking about where moisture goes can trap water in a cavity that used to breathe, and that causes a slower and more expensive problem than the one you were solving. What the right answer is depends on the wall, which is a reason for someone to look at it rather than quote from a photograph.

And if the property is in a historic district, what the front of the house may look like is a separate approval from the building permit, with its own timetable and its own views about windows, siding and trim. That belongs in the schedule at the start rather than being discovered halfway.

What to have ready

The town, roughly what you want done, and photographs — including the inside of any corner that has ever stained. If a window has been sticking, or a floor feels soft near an exterior wall, say so; those are symptoms of the same thing.

If you have had a leak that was repaired and has not come back, mention it anyway. Where the water went is more useful information than whether it stopped.