Siding and cladding near you

The single most important thing to understand about re-cladding is that it is the only time anybody sees the wall. Under the siding there is sheathing, behind that framing and insulation, and somewhere in there should be a water-resistive barrier that keeps wind-driven rain off the sheathing while still letting the wall dry out. Siding is a rain screen rather than a seal: it is designed to shed most of the water and let the layer behind it handle the rest. Which is exactly why a failure stays invisible for years. Water gets in at a badly flashed window head or a split seam, runs down inside, and the first symptom anybody sees is soft sheathing on the morning the old material comes off. That is not a rare surprise on houses of a certain age, it is the ordinary reason a re-clad price changes. Settle before you accept an offer what happens if rot is found: who decides, how it gets priced, and whether the work pauses while you do.

Then the part that decides the method: the height of the wall. Much of what gets re-clad is a two-storey wall on a house with a neighbour a few feet away, which rules out a lift on a residential street and means ladders, ladder jacks or scaffold, and a crew rather than one person. That is working at height, with its own equipment and its own weather rules, and it is the honest reason a gable end costs more to re-clad than the wall beneath it. A shed, a garage, a porch skirt, or the bottom courses of a wall you can reach standing up is a different proposition entirely and worth naming separately when you post.

This category also covers an interior half that is a completely different purchase, and it is worth separating in your own head. Panelling an interior wall, shiplap on a feature wall, boards over a ceiling that has been patched once too often, and the PVC or acrylic panels that go into a shower instead of tile are all cladding in the taxonomy sense — indoor finishing work with no weather in it at all. If that is what you want, say the room. If it is the outside of the house, send a photograph of the whole elevation from a few steps back plus a close-up of the damage, say how many storeys, say what the existing material is if you know it, and say whether anything has been leaking. An offer written from those five answers tends to survive contact with the wall.