Best Type of Home Exterior Siding Depends on Climate

Home owners face many choices for home exterior siding, but making the right selection depends largely on climate, followed by your home's character and your financial means.

Goodness knows, I've bought my share of homes that came with various types of home siding disaster stories. My present home's exterior is brick, wood and mostly stucco. That style is in keeping with the age of my home and its location.

But my last home was an 1898 Victorian, and its previous owners had covered the exterior in vinyl. Purists believe vintage homes such as Victorians should always retain their character. And contrary to popular belief, vinyl siding is not indestructible. One year, my Victorian's siding was damaged during a freak hail storm. It looked like it had been shot at with a machine gun. I had a hard time finding matching vinyl panels because manufacturers change tab dimensions and colors on a regular basis. So, I ended up tearing apart two walls to replace the damaged portions, redoing another wall in its entirety with a slightly different colored vinyl.

Vinyl siding has its pros and cons; however, lots of people intensely dislike vinyl. They dislike it so much that a home in Sacramento's Land Park neighborhood was on the market for six months before a buyer purchased it -- primarily because everybody objected to its vinyl siding.

I also owned a semi-custom Minneapolis suburban home that had aluminum siding. When I sold it, the buyers decided they did not like the exterior peach color and decided to paint it. One of the reasons to own a home with no-maintenance siding is because it involves no maintenance, but paint the aluminum, they did. . . . read more about home exterior siding.

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