Queen Anne Siding Replacement

We’re hard at work on a Queen Anne siding replacement project.  The house has been through a couple of remodels and addition over the years and had a few different sidings installed.  There are some fiber cement, composition shingles, cedar shingles and a stone siding that looks volcanic.  We are removing all the shingles (composition and cedar) and installing new fiber cement siding to match the existing with cedar trim elements.  Many of the windows were retrofit into the home and as a result do not have flanges for us to waterproof to.  We addressed this by using custom break shape metal profiles to effectively build flanges around those windows to allow for proper waterproofing details.  In the front of the house there were cedar shingles and when we tore them off we found that there was no building paper behind the shingles.  Even with the absence of paper the wall sheeting looked practically new.  We’ve seen this a few times now and it goes to show you that cedar shingle siding does a great job keeping the water out of a house.  This is the western facing wall on Queen Anne Hill.  No paper and all was fine after 20+ years!

Queen Anne Siding Replacement Projects,

are typically on older homes that have gone through various “upgrades” over the years.  All the gas piping, cable wires etc that have been added over the years and run on the outside of the wall make things interesting for us when undertaking a Queen Anne siding replacement project.  The guys have to get creative to manage the waterproofing of those openings as the removal and re setting of the pipes and wires would be cost prohibitive.  We haven’t run into any big surprises on the underlying structure on this Queen Anne siding replacement project.  Just the few areas of rot one would expect on an older home.  This was not the case on a siding replacement project we are working on in Ballard.  More on that later…