During the 80s and 90s, when appreciation for MCM was at a low ebb, too many of our sweet ranches were re-wrapped in narrow strip beige vinyl, covering up their original colors and patterns.
If you’ve been dealing with that kind of generic cover-up, or if your siding is simply damaged or in poor repair, you might be considering a replacement.
Before you call a contractor or pick a sample, let’s talk about what mid-century siding is and how to make good siding choices for your home.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A couple of things RIGHT at the top
- Why vinyl siding is always a bad idea.
- Who to talk to before you decide to replace original wood siding.
- How to pick a replacement siding with the most mid mod flavor.
Get siding advice from people not selling you siding
First, a word of caution.
Do not get advice on salvaging your siding only from someone who sells replacement siding.
While they may be consummate professionals, their job depends on tearing off your original material. Instead, talk to an independent pro in a different but related specialty.
Get a building inspection or consult a house painter or carpenter before you decide you NEED to tear off what you have.
IF possible, keep original MCM siding
As you decide whether to replace your siding, my advice is simple. If you have original wood siding on your mid-century house, do not replace it unless absolutely necessary.
Why? Quality!
The wood used in the mid-century era, even on modest homes, is old-growth wood and is no longer available anywhere. This material is stronger, denser, more rot-resistant, and sturdier than the wood you can find at a lumberyard today.
You will never find a new material of the same quality for exterior siding.
Siding types and Terms
The most common siding you’ll see on a mid-century house is a wide, horizontal board. The “exposure” or height of each board is likely more than 8 inches. And each individual board has a “profile” that is tapered with a wide bottom and narrow top.
Check out this excellent post by TheCraftsmanBlog for some handy visuals on siding profiles
Why horizontal siding works for MCM homes
When you stand on the sidewalk, your eye should trace the lines back and forth across the house and feel like it extends right off the edge into infinity. This effect is subtle but intentional, often achieved by:
- Wide boards moving your eye horizontally across the building.
- Invisible corners featuring horizontal boards that miter (meet) at the exterior corner without a vertical piece of corner trim, ensuring the line is not “terminated by anything vertical”.
Horizontal boards are generally the standard. Look for a simple, bevel profile (wedge-shaped pieces that overlap), rather than straight clapboards.
Vertical (board and batten) and panel siding
There may be areas where you have or want to add vertical siding. Some raised ranches and split level homes have board and batten siding made of wide vertical boards covered by narrow battens (vertical strips).
You may even have panel siding made from plywood with vertical striations. This one is common in Eichler and “likeler” style homes. There may be accent areas of panel or of wood shingles. There may be portions of the house where horizontal siding is turned at an angle to set off the roofine!
Other types of MCM siding
Now, your mid-century house might have another kind of siding. Some have aluminum, others have asphalt shingle siding. All material has embodied energy and I always recommend considering maintaining an original material, if possible. But damage or problematic elements (like asbestos) may make that impossible.
My favorite odd ball mcm siding material is the odd square panels found in a Lustron kit home. You’ll know them the minute you see them!
When you need new siding for an MCM home
Now there are times when you need to start over from scratch with siding. Your original wood siding is gone, or it is unsalvageable, or you’re doing an addition.
I don’t recommend to most most people in this situation that they go for an actual wood product as a siding replacement.
Honestly, it is pretty expensive and the wood siding products that are available today are unlikely to be as durable, as densely grained, as excellent in quality, as they always were in the mid-century era.
Wood replacement products that work for MCM
In my opinion, we’ve got two pretty strong options for low or no maintenance wood replacement products on mid-century homes.
I will recommend vinyl 0% of the time. Zero. NO vinyl siding for Mid-Century homes!
But I will pretty happily endorse either a James Hardie or an LP SmartSide siding replacement, with a couple of caveats. Because there are ways to make these work better and ways to make them work less well, esthetically for a mid-century house.
To achieve that original looking horizontal line, you should look for a wide board with a minimum 8-inch and ideally a 10-inch exposure.
Get playful! Think about putting panel product above and below certain windows to highlight them. Or is there an area near the front door or a mass where the roof line changes?
You might want to switch to vertical board and batten there. Or in some cases, depending on your geography or house style, you might want to think about a vertical board and batten siding for the whole house.
Trim color will make or break your re-siding project
For a modern – a mid mod – look, match your trim to your siding color.
You can have an accent color! No one needs to live a monochrome life. BUT let’s use that color strategically.
Anywhere you have a contrasting color, it’ll be for a color pop. For example, your front door or a block of color that’s defining an area. Just like you might switch to a from a vertical to a horizontal to a vertical siding, you might switch from one color to a brighter or a more eye catching color at a certain block of the house.
But never use color contrast for trim. It will just create little outlines and boxes around everything. That’s the wrong look for a midcentury house – unless you are specifically looking for a very time capsule mid-century traditional look.
Mid-Century TRADITIONAL if you will. Like so!
(This house has always been a favorite of mine and would be the literal Time Capsule CUTEST if it still had it’s original front door.)
This adorable time capsule house has both. Yes, there’s white trim, but they are ALSO using color blocking to highlight key areas.
And since we can’t go back, we can’t do that lovely little end cap metal piece that lets every horizontal line extend right off the edge of the building. We can minimize the effect of the boxiness of having to put a vertical line at the outside corner of every part of the house by making sure it’s exactly the same color.
Listen Now On
Resources beyond Siding? Check out my collection of Research Library Nerd Episodes
- The Right Roof Replacement for Your Mid-Century House
- Should I replace my mid-century windows?
- Temperature and Moisture Control in Mid-Century Homes
- Lighting A Mid-Century Home
- A Mid-Century Tile Tutorial
- The five mid-century cabinet questions you need to answer.
Need some more help?
- Get Ready to Remodel, my course that teaches you to DIY a great plan for your mid mod remodel!
- Want us to create your mid-century master plan? Apply here to get on my calendar for a Discovery Call!
- Need some targeted home advice? Schedule a 30-minute Zoom consult with me. We’ll dig into an issue or do a comprehensive mid century house audit.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
00:00
We’re talking about siding for mid-century home. Today, the wrong siding for a mid-century home can go so wrong because our homes have simple, subtle shapes and need the siding to play with, not against them. Is it the chicken or the egg that during the 80s and 90s, appreciation for mid-century modern was at a low ebb, and so many of our sweet little ranches were blandly re wrapped in narrow strip beige vinyl covering their original siding colors and patterns.
00:24
Now you’ve heard me do episodes on making the right choices for mid-century windows, roofs, lighting and more, so you won’t be surprised by my overall pattern. We’re going to start with a little history. Why mid-century houses use the materials they do? I’m going to advise you to keep what you’ve got if it’s original, and then we’ll talk about replacement siding for a mid-century home. If yours is not salvageable, let’s go. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2212.
00:58
I am really looking forward to this one. This is a question I get asked about all the time by people who are reaching out to me via Instagram with questions about their homes and what are the right choices to make for them going forward. It’s also something that I advise just about every mid-century design client of my own on because it comes up a lot. You know, if we’re making any kind of an addition, that addition will need new siding. If the house is in poor shape, has been aggressively flipped or remodeled in the past, it may not have its original siding, and in some cases, the existing siding is just in poor repair.
01:34
So I talk about mid-century siding a lot, but I’ve never done a podcast episode on it, and this is going to be a good one if you are in a place where you’re thinking about siding repair or replacement for your mid-century home, you’re probably also in a position to need to update or backdate other parts of it. So you’ll want to check out my suite of what I think of as my research library nerd episodes. Let’s see off the top of my head, those are going to be the right roof replacement for a mid-century house. Lighting a mid-century home. Should I replace my mid-century windows? The answer is probably no. Mid-century tile tutorial.
02:11
In each of these, I kind of hit the same pattern of talking about why we do things, the history, the philosophy, the style that’s associated specifically with mid-century, some helpful terminology you’re going to want to know and design details to make mid-century appropriate choices, rather than generically HGTV or choices that are simply trendy and popular right now, I will, you know what? I’m just going to drop a little link to this laundry list. Maybe I’ll add a few more library episodes to a list in today’s show notes. Episode, one more thing before we really get into it, it is October.
02:44
Now it’s the middle of October, and I don’t want to be aggressive with you, but a little heads up that whatever form your model planning is going to take, if you’ve been wishing, hoping, thinking that you might want to start making some concrete changes to your home next year in 2020, year in 2026 right now is the right time to get your master plan thinking underway. You can join us inside of ready to remodel if you’d like help to DIY a master plan, even though you missed the first October call, there’s a recording of that.
03:15
Or if you want to hire me, us to do a master plan for your remodel, we would be delighted. I would love to chat with you about that. Just know that we have only one spot left on our calendar for a master plan that we’ll be delivering the solutions package the options to before the end of this calendar year, and while the right time to start your planning is always now, there is a psychological rhythm to the year, and I do find that people have a better chance getting on to contractor rosters for the next year if they’re reaching out to get in touch right around the sort of January calendar turnover.
03:54
So my advice to you is, if you’re planning to make any changes whatsoever, next year, right now is the time to get started. And the benefit of it too is there may, actually may be some changes you can think about making before the end of the year, when you begin your master plan planning process. The possibilities of things you can switch little lifestyle changes you can make small level one changes you can start right away are here. You don’t have to be constantly putting off your joy until later. Part of making a master plan is thinking about what you change right away and looking forward to all the bigger changes you might make further down the line.
04:29
Okay, so let’s talk about siding. I’ve got a lot to say, and of course, because it’s me, I’m going to start from the very abstract. I want to actually just talk about the purpose of siding on your house. It is an outer layer that covers and protects the bubble of your home. It’s a secure barrier. No one’s going to pull it off with their hands and walk right through. It keeps animals and pests out of the house when it’s properly attached and snugly fit. It’s a weather barrier, causing rain, snow and ice to drip down, go away from the house rather than working their way inward, and it’s sturdy enough to protect against blowing objects in a storm, hail, etc.
05:06
It’s not much of an insulator, but that’s okay, because that’s not the job of siding. So people have been using siding on their houses a lot longer than the mid-century era and some of the technological and esthetic changes in our own era, and the way we use it differs from historical use from how it’s always been used before. So it really is important that we make visually and technologically correct choices for our homes, for our mid-century homes that are going to be different than the correct answer for the owner of a craftsman or a Victorian or a colonial style of house.
05:45
Now I don’t feel a need to bury the lead here. My advice to you is that if you have original siding on your mid-century house, do not replace it. There are exceptions and caveats, of course, and you may have water issues, woodpecker issues, it may be in poor repair. You might be dealing with damage done by previous homeowners. I’m not saying that there are no situations in which you may need to replace or partially replace your mid-century siding, and I’m going to talk about what are good choices later in the episode, if that is your situation. But I just want to start by saying that if there is no other reason to replace your mid-century siding, please don’t, and I want you to do just a bit more reflection before you decide that you do need to replace it again.
06:32
If you’ve done your research, you’re good, but doing your research is not having gotten advice on needing to replace your siding only from someone who sells replacement siding. Please do not get advice on whether your siding can be salvaged, repaired or repainted, from someone whose job it is to sell you a different variety of siding, whose job depends on them sending in a crew to tear off your original siding, throw it in the landfill and put on something else.
07:04
I don’t want to imply that all of those people, anyone in that profession, is disingenuous by nature, but that’s it’s just not in their interest to talk to you about what are the benefits of your existing siding, nor do they necessarily have the taste or the training to appreciate what is already good about the siding you have. So if you are wondering if your siding needs replacement, talk to an independent assessor. Get a building inspection, talk to someone who paints houses rather than someone who puts on new siding, and factor in all of those opinions before you move forward. So let’s take a quick detail into philosophy.
07:46
What is the purpose? What is the meaning of siding? Basically, it’s an outer layer that covers your house. It’s a secure barrier. No one can pull it off with their hands and come right through it. It keeps animals and pests out of your house, snugly fitted. It’s a weather barrier. Causes water to drip down and go away from the house, rather than working its way inward. And it’s sturdy enough to protect the house against blowing objects in a storm, branches, pale, etc. It also serves a small purpose of sort of supporting the house from sideways racking keeping what in a mid-century house are often array of an array of post and beams, or an array of two by four studs, which could theoretically all just sort of tip over sideways like dominoes.
08:31
Having those long horizontal boards nailed up against them helps keep that upright and prevent the racking from happening. But siding also serves a very important esthetic purpose on a mid-century house. Now the most common wood siding type you’re going to see, if we’re not talking about a brick house, very common in certain areas, or a stone house, also certain parts of the country, mid-century houses and stone cladding or peanut butter and jelly. But I would probably, yeah, I would certainly argue that throughout the country, the most common type of siding you’re going to see on a mid-century house is wood, and it is most commonly going to be a wide, horizontal board.
09:11
We might call that clappered, but actually, technically, it is a bevel profile of siding. We’ll get into terminology again in a moment, but it has an important esthetic effect, and that is because mid-century homes are mostly single level. They are all about connecting outwards to their environment.
They are about being flow, creating flow between inside and out, and the wide horizontal line that moves across most of the house is part of that visual message. If you stand on the sidewalk in front of even a very modest mid-century house with its original siding, you can trace with your eye, horizontally, sideways, back and forth across the house, and you’ll see it just kind of extends you out to the end. By the way, I’m going to talk about trim and the right colors for trim and a little bit about the types of trim that you want to aim for if you’re doing a mid-century replacement siding project. And what to appreciate about original mid-century trim in a minute.
10:10
But I want to actually talk about the lack of trim at the corners of the horizontal wood signing on a traditional mid-century house construction. They do not have. If you look at a modern house with modern siding replaced in the last 510, 15 years, vinyl houses certainly have this as well. So basically, anytime since the 80s, there will be a vertical piece of trim that guards the corner all the way up and down at the edge of the horizontal siding, if there is horizontal siding.
10:39
But in a house earlier than the mid-century, all of those horizontal boards meet and miter at the exterior corner, and they’re actually protected by probably a metal end cap that matches the shape of the siding board and then is that painted over, so it is sort of invisible. That effect, though, means that, effectively, the horizontal line continues straight out until it just goes off into infinity, until it goes off into the landscape. It’s not terminated by anything vertical. So that has, again, that effect of moving your eyes sideways.
11:13
Now, a house that has more than just wooden siding on it might have a portion around the front entry, the main door, the largest window, for example, that has some vertical siding that’s drawing your eye to be at rest there and then move horizontally away outward into the landscape and the other parts of it. Or it might have, might have a long, low hip roof that runs all the way around with a distinctive fascia board. Or it might even just be a gutter line these days that, again, gives you a big horizontal effect.
11:42
But there might also be a knee wall of brick or stone that, again, there’s even a narrower piece now of horizontal board might be vertical board when it’s narrow enough that is, again creating big swaths and subtler swaths of horizontal lines. This wide lines, wide boards which move your eye horizontally, rather than a more densely patterned a narrower profile of wood siding that you’ll see on, say, a Victorian house, that more close together the horizontal lines of the horizontal siding are, the more your eye just sort of reads them all as one block, and that works well with a more ornate, detailed home, even maybe a craftsman cottage, but certainly a Victorian, a Queen Anne, anything like that.
12:33
Your eye isn’t meant to be looking at the siding, and it’s not meant to be run side to side across the building. You’re catching it on different patterns of Windows, the detail in the windows themselves, perhaps leaded glass, the trim around them, Gingerbread, at the porch, at the ceiling line. There’s so many details built into a design like that. As opposed to a mid-century house is more minimalist. It’s depending more on its shape, and it’s giving you that sense of this house extends out with a number of different factors contributing to that. It might be a deep, overhanging eave. It might be wide, horizontal siding boards.
13:06
It might be a stone or a block knee wall that actually extends out past the house itself, turning into a little bit of a privacy fence. Any one of those things adds up. All of those things together add up to horizontality and extending out into the landscape. So let’s pause here and do a little bit of terminology on what we’re actually talking about with these boards themselves. I’m going to point you here rather than doing some profile sketches of siding boards myself, I’m just going to use the excellent reference of Scott Sidler’s blog, the Craftsman blog.
13:44
Now, just like last week, when I was talking with unflipping, with Dana and Colin, we talked about how the principles of unflipping A house apply to more than just mid-century homes. Flippers do horrible numbers on houses of all styles, and the concept of putting back the right choices for the specific house is pretty universal. So in that vein, I feel a lot of commonality with and shared passion with Scott.
14:07
Whenever he talks about preserving original features, in particular, original woodwork on your home of any era, when he talks about preserving your original windows, he and I are singing the same song, even though his blog is literally called the Craftsman blog, and most of the windows that he’s working on restoring and preserving are of an earlier date than the mid-century. He’s a place I would point you if you’re looking for arguments to yourself or to persuade a partner another decision maker in your house remodel process on not to replace your original windows or siding. He is a passionate evangelist of preserving original woodwork, maintaining and repairing it, rather than tearing it out, throwing it out and replacing it with something that is not going to have the lifespan.
14:50
He’s also a business owner who regularly interacts hands on with original building materials, and so he has an amazing set of visual examples on his blog. On his Instagram of the differing to be fair, to be honest, the diminishing quality of wood from various eras, he’s a great reference on how old growth wood used, not just for the structure of homes, but also for details like windows and siding, was a completely different category of material in the 1900s certainly in the early 1900s as the take he most often points to, but I would argue, still very true, well into the mid-century, era that you can see is visibly different from what you find at a lumber yard today.
15:37
Old Growth pine is qualitatively different from something that is plantation grown today. It is stronger, it’s denser, it is more long lasting. It is more weather resistant, it is more rot resistant, it is sturdier. Not to get totally sidetracked here, but if you’ve ever tried to hammer a nail into some of the original wood in your mid-century house, ever tried to, yeah, put a nail into the exposed floor joists above your basement, in your basement ceiling to hang something or store something, you will know that that is incredibly hard wood to put a nail into. It is solid.
16:13
I personally never try to just take a hammer and nail to any of the original mid-century wood in my house without predrilling a hole first, because I will bend the nail every single time. This, you know, is also a factor of I’m not the most skilled hammerer. Is that a word? Anyway, there are people with better hammer skills than I but also, I would just argue mid-century, wood is pretty hard to hammer a nail into, and it’s true for siding as well. This, this stuff that’s wrapped around our mid-century houses, even the most modest bill or grade home is old growth redwood forest. It is dense of grain, naturally, more rot resistant, naturally more insect proof.
16:59
Obviously, failures of maintenance can have damaged it over the years. But if there is anything you can salvage here, I recommend that you salvage it, because you will never find a new wood material that is of the same quality for exterior siding doesn’t exist. Okay, that was a little digression, but let’s get back to our terminology. There’s two elements that you’re going to think about, mostly for horizontal side wooden siding, or wood replacement siding on a mid-century home.
17:25
And that’s going to be profile, which is the cross sectional shape of the board itself. It might be a rectangle, or it might be sort of a triangle, a very, very narrow triangle. Or it might even have a triangular shape with a little notch at the bottom that is meant, is often referred to as a bevel, and it’s meant to overlap and sort of set a specific height pattern for easier install. There are sometimes types of siding with more elaborate profiles, but on a mid-century home, you’re probably going to see a very simple profile, and it’s probably going to be a beveled profile.
18:04
So rather than a series of straight rectangular boards clapboards, which are overlapped one over the other, you’re going to probably see these sort of wedge shaped pieces which are referred to as a bevel profile in the siding. The other thing that’s going to be important when I talk about narrow or wide boards, the siding, official term for that would be exposure, how much of the board is exposed, which relates to, if you bought this board at the store, it might be 10 inches high, but when you install it as siding, you’re not putting one right on top of the other. They’re overlapping a little bit again, so that water will shed off of them always, and also so that they can kind of pinch each other in one place.
18:49
Because again, when we’re talking about original wood materials, we’re talking about something that has a little bit of natural expansion and contraction quality in it. When it’s humid, it might be a slightly different size than when it’s not so you probably might notice that your mid-century siding boards are nailed in such a way that they’re only secured in one horizontal line. But their each board is kind of nailed in itself and pinching in place the board below it at the narrowest point in its bevel, ideally the nail going through the thick part, the strongest part of the beveled board is not catching the top narrow edge of the beveled piece of siding.
19:29
But having de installed some siding on my own house, when I turned my exterior breezeway into an interior mudroom, I will tell you I was working really hard to salvage all of the boards I could for my own purposes.
I reinstalled some of them as new exterior sites, yes, not new, but as renewed exterior siding on the outside back of my house, and I saved a couple other for repair purposes or in case anyone else wants them, because they are amazing, beautiful, old growth wood, but in some cases the original. The siding installer had been a little careless and had nailed through two boards at once, the thick part at the bottom and the thin part at the top. And in that case, the thin part often was fracturing when I was taking the nails out, no matter how carefully I took the nails out.
20:13
So you’re thinking about the siding, the profile, sort of edge shape, and the exposure, how much of that is showing up in the finished horizontal pattern. And for a mid-century house, we’re looking for six in a minimum eight inches. Ideally, we’re really looking for like a 10 inch exposure in our horizontal siding in order for our eye to be able to follow the horizontal lines across the whole width of the building, and ideally right off the edge into the world beyond. So like I say, I’m going to point you to rather than redrawing these profiles myself.
20:51
There’s actually a lovely collection of profile examples and more complicated, detailed names on the Craftsman blog, ultimate guide to wood siding. And I will just link to that in my own show notes, because you should check it out now, of course, not all mid-century houses have horizontal bevel siding. In California, you’re going to find a bunch of different other types of California homes having two things in common. One, a little bit less intense, certainly winter elements to deal with, and having milder situation in general. So they’re more interested in roof overhangs that are wide for shade, which protects siding.
21:34
The deeper your overhangs, the more your wooden siding is protected. And just that sort of early, mid-century, modern post and beam design ethos coming across the country from the west the cliff may designs often have board and batten siding that would be vertical. And again, we’re going to talk about nailing patterns and swelling natural growth, because they were sometimes just rough cut, old growth wood you would be putting on the wide boards, the board, part of the board and Batten, and not nailing it to the house at all, or maybe nailing it in just on one side, and then allowing it to swell or shrink across and pinching in the far side, not nailed down with a nail through the batten.
22:19
That’s the smaller, narrower vertical piece that stands in front of it, a batten, is usually one or two inches wide, and then the vertical boards themselves are eight, at least inches wide. So you again, have a pretty easily visual, easily visualized pattern. There you can stand out at the street, and you’ll easily see each individual board and each individual batten. So like I say, the cliff may designs which Cliff himself was kind of taking off the ranch style, the rustic, practical, vernacular style of ranch buildings.
22:55
And so he’s going with what they were using, board and batten siding, Rough and Ready, ready to go. And then a little bit later in the Eichler homes, they were often using a panel siding that appeared to be vertical, had some built in vertical striations in it, but was just plywood. Effectively, this is the moment in the mid-century era we’re switching from older world materials, horizontal clapboard siding with a different profile, which had been used on many types of homes before, and now we’re just tweaking that style a little bit, and we’re shifting into machined materials, new technology and materials.
23:32
It should also be noted that not every mid-century house had wood siding at all in the first place, because this was an era of experimentation and efficiency, trying out new materials. So this is the beginning of aluminum siding created in panels that look as though they are wide, horizontal wooden boards. My little sister’s extremely modest, two bedroom home built in the 1950s early 50s, has original aluminum siding that looks like it’s horizontal board siding, but isn’t you’ll also find the occasional mid-century house that has asphalt shingles, or even asbestos shingle siding that obviously is not ideal and needs to be replaced if it hasn’t been dealt with yet.
24:13
And then there’s even some more fun, wacky options out there. I won’t go too far down the Lustron rabbit hole today, but if you want to google it actually I’ll put a picture in the show notes. The Lustron homes were a type of mass manufactured house. There were, I think several 1000. Was all that were ever made. But they were made using as many metal materials as possible, a metal roof, metal interior, finished walls, you have to use a magnet to hang a picture on it. Metal stud frame in the walls and the exterior siding is a series of square metal panels, roughly two foot by two foot in dimension. It’s freaking adorable and also very odd. So let’s focus however, this is mostly going to be an episode on wooden siding.
24:55
So if you were trying to return to an appropriate siding material for your mid-century, Hans. House after someone attacked it with four inch beige vinyl in 1990 How do you know what is the right type of siding to go for? Are you looking for an eight or a 10 inch exposure board, or should you put in some board and batten? Should you think about panels?
I would say the easiest way to answer this question is going to be to figure out what was going on with the house originally, and trend back towards that, if there are any other homes in your neighborhood of a similar shape that still have any of their original siding, that’s your template failing that you could go hunting on the internet or for a house of a similar style and shape to see what kind of original siding they had.
25:40
This is always also a good time to go look at contemporary advertising literature, and that right there homes in other neighborhoods. Or contemporary advertising literature is also a way to add more interest and detail to your house in a siding replacement project than it may have had in the first place. I’ll be the first to call out my own home has the most modest, basic type of siding that’s possible. It’s just wide, 10 inch exposure horizontal boards, no brick, no stone, no knee wall details, and on my exposed end Gable sides, those horizontal boards just go right up to the top of the little exposed triangle Gable.
26:19
There are other ways to make those places more interesting. It’s possible to have a little bit of a transition to a vertical a board in batten or a panel style of siding right around the front door, around the main window. You might think about if you’ve got exposed end gables, the corner triangle at the end of your roof, that might be a place to put in a vertical, striated panel board, or to I often see a sort of a piece following the angle of the roof and creating a bunch of interlocking smaller and smaller triangles coming down to the sort of horizontal line that forms the high water line of the house, the edge of the roof where it does come down.
27:03
There are moments when you think, maybe this house would be benefited if your house has any kind of an exposed roof line, an elevated roof line with high triangular clerestory windows reaching out that might be a place to surround with vertical siding to pick up a vertical trim line that’s running up between the windows. So the possibilities grow from what will enhance the style of the house. There are actually even times when switching from a horizontal format to a vertical format can create an overall horizontal pattern. I’m thinking of the kind of house that has a wide, long brick or stone knee wall running along up until about four foot height.
27:47
And then there is an even line that has in some places, Windows and High Rock this color rattle windows in some places and wall in some places. Then above that, another pattern you might do horizontal siding above the windows, but then between the windows, a panel effect that has the same color trim as the windows themselves, or maybe a narrow vertical pattern that, again, tightly grouped enough a narrow vertical pattern can become a sort of holistic part of the horizontal stripe.
28:17
So you can do more than just run horizontal boards across the house, and simple term, around every window, if you’ve got an interesting alignment, if you’re vertical, if you have maybe a second story element, and your vertical Windows align from one floor to another, creating a panel effect between them can be a really interesting effect. There’s actually a local, a local, not a developer, I wouldn’t say, because he didn’t do whole neighborhoods, but there is an area on the just outside the Beltline in Madison where there’s a number of houses clearly done by the same person or company, where above and below each window there is a panel element that’s just flat and is sometimes painted a slightly contrasting color. And then between the windows there is wide board, horizontal siding, and it’s lovely. It’s a really delicate, interesting look.
29:07
Actually, between them, I believe there is vertical board and patent binding siding. I will put a picture of that in the show notes as well. The point is, when your house has a relatively simple shape, long, low ranch when it has a more interesting shape, an elevated sort of an A frame roof line popping up, or even just an end Gable exposed towards the street, choosing the right siding to highlight and improve and enhance that quality so important and gives so much to the style of The House, whereas just wrapping it in a simple, basic, too narrow profile vinyl is always the wrong idea.
29:47
Okay, here’s the moment when I’m going to beat up on vinyl, and I’m going to tell you that there are so many reasons. There are so many reasons why I do not like vinyl siding as a replacement product for mid-century homes. The. First of which is that it’s a terrible material. Environmentally. It’s dangerous and unhealthy for the people who manufacture it. It’s not great for the people who install it. Even vinyl itself standing next to it you is not going to cause you a health issue. But if you take a house that once had wood siding and you suddenly replace it with vinyl siding. You have changed the moisture permeability of your house.
30:27
And I talked about this a couple of episodes ago in my thermal and moisture control for mid-century houses episode. But really, you’re plastic wrapping the house. You’re sealing in something that was once more breathable and that can within a time span as short as five to 10 years, create hidden mold and mildew issues inside of your walls, which is really, really bad, very dangerous, and also a ding on the long term lifespan of the house. So bad for health, bad for the house. It’s bad.
30:58
But the other reason I resent vinyl so much is that it always comes in that Victorian style, very narrow exposure profile of, like, only four inches between one board and another, sometimes six, which is a kind of Uncanny Valley of it doesn’t look like it’s right for any era, but that four inch in particular, it’s there because the vinyl itself is a weak material. It’s too bendy. Both. It’s too you can bang into it. If somebody leans a ladder against the South house too hard, it will dent and divot and then not bounce back. So it needs to be a relatively ripply profile. The same reason that a corrugated tin roof is corrugated is to make it stronger.
31:35
So the vinyl siding is four inches to make it stronger, because it’s a weak material, but that is not the right trim profile. It’s not the right siding profile for a mid-century house, as we’ve discussed. So please, please, please, no matter what you do, do not replace your existing siding with vinyl. Having vinyl siding on your house is one of the best reasons I can think of to think about new siding for your mid-century house. So all right, let’s actually run down a couple of other lists reasons that I think would be completely rational, reasonable, acceptable reasons to need to replace your siding.
32:13
It might have you could choose to replace your siding because it has lead paint on it. I would argue that’s not a good enough reason to replace your siding. Rather than having someone test for lead paint, say, hey, it’s got lead paint on it, I want to tear that off and throw it away for you and put on new siding. I would look around for someone who’s willing to remediate the lead paint on your house, either remove it or properly encapsulate it.
This is what I did on my own house. So yes, it’s certainly an issue. If you find that your original, beautiful wood siding has lead paint on it, but it’s not a you must replace it, you might find that, particularly if your house had not paint but a stain over it to begin with, that your house has sustained a lot of either water damage over the years or bird damage.
33:00
Woodpeckers can really do a number on original wood siding, particularly stained rather than painted wood siding, and it’s hard to repair it as well, because if a woodpecker knocks a hole in your house wood siding, when it’s painted, you can patch and repair that hole and then repaint over it. And if you do a nice enough job, it will basically look invisible.
But it’s harder to invisibly patch stained wood than it is painted. And I have had several neighbors in my lifespan on the block choose to finally deal with woodpecker laden, original stained wood rather than painted wood board finish on their house by replacing you may also just find that, you know, due to if the you had a roof issue at one point, you might have a water issue in the siding, you can get to a place where the siding is just too damaged to go on with it’s also a time to think about replacement siding.
33:53
If you are changing the footprint of your house, if you’re adding on in one place or several places, the new area is going to need new siding, and you might choose to reside the entire house at that time. I’m just going to stop here, though, and mention that even for people who have had siding put over their mid-century houses, sometimes the original siding is torn off, landfilled, and new siding is installed.
34:20
At other times, somebody just came along and put vinyl siding right over the original wood siding, and in those cases, sometimes the original wood siding has sustained damage by again, being moisture sealed inside the house. It starts to rot. It has bug problems.
There’s all sorts of creepy things that can happen behind vinyl siding, but sometimes, particularly if the house was flipped not too long ago, if what happened to your house was not that the whole thing, including the brick, was painted gray, but they put on boring gray siding over everything, you might be able to take it back off again. This happened to a consultation client of mine who was able to find that they’d had a small addition put on the back of their house before they bought it. And the new addition had vinyl siding, and they just vinyl sided over the whole house.
35:03
She hated it, because she should have, and she just decided one day to go out there and take some off. The danger of this is vinyl siding is really only supposed to go on one way, and it’s kind of hard to disassemble without going all in. But she tore off a piece of the vinyl at the corner of the house and realized that they did have original wood siding still underneath it, around all of the house except the new add on dining room. And so they just took off all the vinyl, repainted and repaired the original wood siding and got some replacement wood siding to finish the other part of the house.
35:37
They did go ahead and it was horizontal siding over a brick knee wall in most of the house. And what they ended up doing was changing to a vertical wood siding profile around the addition so that it was never, it was never going to be a perfect blend. They wanted to highlight that it was slightly different, but they also wanted to feel related in kind like a cool younger cousin of the original siding. And it did. It turned out great. It was all painted the same color and blended and stood out in roughly equal measure. So there can be a happy ending, even if you have vinyl siding over your house, you don’t necessarily need to start from scratch. Do a little exploratory demo if you are so inclined and find out what your situation is.
36:16
All right. So here’s the part of the episode where I admit that sometimes we need to start over from scratch with siding, and your original wood siding is gone, or it is unsalvageable, and we’re doing something new, I don’t recommend to most new most people in this situation that they go for an actual wood product as a siding replacement. Honestly, it is pretty expensive, and as we’ve discussed, the wood siding products that are available today are unlikely to be as durable, as densely grained, as excellent in quality, as they were easily available in the mid-century era.
36:56
If you are going to get to a good quality, durable exterior grade wood siding. You’re probably sourcing something tropical rather than something that’s coming out of an American pine forest. Certainly pine siding not a good idea today, even though it’s a softwood product that’s on all of our mid-century houses, if it’s original. So yeah, there’s a lot of complexity to choosing to go with an original wood product for siding today. To that end, though, I think we’ve got two pretty strong options for low or no maintenance wood replacement products on mid-century homes. I will recommend vinyl 0% of the time, but I will pretty happily endorse either a James Hardie or an LP smart side siding replacement, with a couple of caveats that there are ways to make these work better and ways to make them work less well, esthetically for a mid-century house.
37:52
Just to get into the distinction a little bit, they’re kind of just two competing product lines. The James Hardie is a fiber cement siding so it’s made of Portland cement, sand, water and cellulose fibers. It doesn’t, as I understand it, have any actual wood in it, but it’s meant to look like wood, and it goes on pretty narrow. It ends up being quite durable, and it’s even reasonably fire safe, certainly better to be around in any kind of a fire than vinyl. Lord, help us all. And it’s just a nice, durable, permanent material. They will make it with a wood texture pattern into it, which works reasonably well from an esthetic point of view. Is it real wood? No, of course, it’s not, but it looks all right.
38:43
And there are a bunch of things we can do to make it work better on a mid-century home than not. Then the other one I mentioned is LP smart side, and this one is an engineered wood. It’s wood and resin, wood fibers and resin. I used to think of it as having plastic in it, but they’re calling it resin, and we’ll go with that. And it cuts like wood and doesn’t require a lot of specialized tools and generally goes in and feels pretty sturdy. And again, it can either be painted or it can have a color embedded in it.
39:15
And in both of these cases, that can make for that can make for a zero maintenance product you’ve you choose the color you like, you leave it alone forever, and you never have to paint your house again. So there is that that’s very convenient. I actually have a caveat to that, which is that I think that unpainted, color filled LP smart side siding looks terrible. It’s shiny. It has a wood texture that’s too intense, and it’s sheeny and shiny, and I think it’s awful, but I do actually like it quite a bit when it is painted over, taking down the initial built in sheen and sort of filling in some of the thickness, the too high profile of its fake wood texture. Yeah.
40:00
So even though it is not a zero maintenance choice, my recommendation is, if you’re going to go with LP smart side, I might actually even you can get it for cheaper if you don’t have the color put in, but I would say you could even have the color that you like put in, but then paint it over again in the same color for the for the most wood. Look replacement product, either of these come certainly most commonly in a horizontal lap product. And so that’s probably going to be what you choose for your for your mid-century. Basic home is a wide the widest option they have for a horizontal lap product.
40:43
But as we were talking before, there are a bunch of things you can do to mimic the different panel different verticality versus horizontality elements in a mid-century house to make it much more interesting than just running horizontal lines around the whole house. So you can absolutely think about maybe putting panel product above and below certain windows to highlight them. You can think about, is there an area near the front door or a mass where the roof line changes, where you want to switch to vertical board and batten, or in some cases, depending on your geography, and if you’re in a California house, you might want to think about a vertical board and batten style of house.
41:20
By the way, for either of these products, I believe if you ask for board and batten, you’re not gonna get a series of horizontal boards and battens. You’re gonna get four by eight panels with battens applied to the outside edge of them. That’s okay. That actually, to me, feels like a very mid-century practicality idea. Frank Lloyd Wright himself in one of his two kit homes. His second style of kit home has long horizontal lines, but he actually had horizontal plywood panels mounted with the eight foot length, or sometimes the 12 foot length and the four foot width, and hiding the gap with batten horizontally mounted battens, and then also putting on fake horizontal battens between them.
42:01
If Frank can get away with it, we can all get away with it. Let’s just put it that way. This is, though, also where so you don’t have to stick with just horizontal siding, although, of course, a siding installer will prefer how simple it can be. But this is also where the details of color choice are going to be the most important. Because, as with everything in the mid-century, materials mid-century, the clamshell trim you’re going to find on the inside of house is just a little bit more delicate, has just a little bit more organic curvature, a little bit more interest than the blocky sort of modern farmhouse, square profile modern trim that you could have as an alternative.
42:40
And the way that trim is detailed on a siding replacement project of any style is going to be a little chunkier, a little less delicate, a little more blocky than you’ll find on an original mid-century home, particularly at the outer edges. I talked only in the episode about how on an original mid-century house, the siding boards meet at an outside corner with a metal end cap that mimics the sort of in and out sense of the overlapping siding pieces as you go down. So there’s not a vertical line running down the outside of a house.
43:13
There’s this kind of a Christmas tree shape of comes out a little bit jogs in, comes out a little bit jogs in, comes out a little bit jogs in, which emphasizes the horizontal line of the boards, rather than cutting them off with a vertical edge in a modern replacement siding product. We just don’t do it that way. That’s not how they’re installed. In fact, I think what they tend to do is install all the horizontal boards and then strike a vertical line, slice them all evenly, and then pop on the exterior trim piece, one on each face of the outer corner, seal it all up with caulk and call it good.
43:45
It’s a practical choice, but it’s esthetically a little bit of a loss. And this is why it is absolutely essential that you match your trim to your siding color, rather than doing a color for the siding and then letting a white line outline the vertical edge of every corner of your building.
44:03
And also, I would argue, the vertical and horizontal outlines around every window in a mid-century house. Not in every single case. If you’re going for mid-century traditional, if you’re kind of going for a mid-century gingerbread or mid-century cottage, there are a couple of little subsets where you do want to go ahead and have white trim and mint green siding or pink or yellow in most cases.
44:28
However, for a modern a mid mod look, you’re going to match your trim to your siding color precisely anywhere you have a contrasting color.
It’ll be for a color pop, front door or a block of color that’s defining an area, just like you might switch to a from a vertical to a horizontal to a vertical siding, you might switch from one color to a brighter or a more eye catching color at a certain block of the house, but never for little outlines and boxes around everything. So since we can’t go back if we’re replacing siding, we can’t do that lovely little end cap metal piece that lets every horizontal line extend right off the edge of the building. We can minimize the effect of the boxiness of having to put a vertical line at the outside corner of every part of the house by making sure it’s exactly the same color.
45:14
This is kind of the difference between a lovely shaded pencil sketch or a cartoon where the outline of every shape is black, in this case, white. I’m going to wrap up here, but I have one more thing to say, which is, while you are thinking about perhaps repainting your existing siding or choosing colors for new replacement siding, please do not consider painting your original brick or stone. You do not need to, by the way. If you’re not wild about the color of your original brick or stone, you can modify it by choosing the right the perfect color for siding around it.
45:53
You can do a lot to change a color that feels too heavy, too pink, too blue, something that doesn’t please you, you can modify the way that it feels by surrounding it with something else. So in one way or another, it’s just, I talked about this in the thermal and moisture control of mid-century buildings episode. It’s just never a good idea, performance wise, to seal in what should have been a breathable, porous surface, brick or stone, you and every future owner will regret it if you if you make this mistake. So please don’t let yourself.
46:25
And if you’re listening to this now and saying, oh god Della my brick and stone are already painted, take a deep breath. It’s not the end of the world, and probably it’s not going to cause your house to fall down, but we could talk about it if you ever want to send me an Instagram DM about it there. Yeah, there’s no use crying over it spilled milk or painted brick, although I do, but let’s not contribute to the problem any further in the future.
46:56
I’m going to put some visual examples of different types of siding and how they can make really charming, detailed effects on a mid-century home onto the show notes page for this episode. Go check those out. But also walk your own neighborhood. Walk other neighborhoods. Appreciate the subtle details of siding, even when the color is consistent across the entire house, a moment where the siding switches from horizontal to vertical, or where a gable end is outlined in a series of recessing lines matching the roof line, or where a little bit of venting is sort of highlighted, not with color, but just with a change in the siding.
47:35
These can all be really, really lovely things, and they aren’t things we have to give up when we choose to re replace siding. They are things we can build into a new house and really appreciate and enjoy as we go forward. So hopefully today you got a little bit of inspiration, a little bit more background on what’s already great about mid-century siding and what you should look for if you come to a place where you need to replace your mid-century siding, you will also want to grab (if you don’t have it already) my mid-century color guide.
48:03
This is more explicitly talking about what colors to choose for new paint on a mid-century house, where to think about the contrast between an accent door, a further recommendation to never paint your trim a contrasting color. But it does also show in showing visual examples of mid-century houses in different colors. It’s going to show you different siding patterns, vertical, horizontal, different widths, and how they play out really nicely. So you can go ahead and grab that anytime you want to at midmod-midwest.com/colors or I will link to that in the show notes page.
48:35
At, well, a lot of links in the show notes page today, siding is one of those. It’s one of those things. So if you’ve still got questions about this, I absolutely include advice on siding in every mid-century master plan, and I talk about this regularly with a ready to remodel crew. But if you just want to have a conversation with me, one on one about the right replacement siding choice, or the right colors, or the combination of decisions that come when you’re replacing siding, things like garage doors and window trim and lighting and details like mailboxes and house numbers things like that. That’s all conversations I love to have in our 30 minute consult calls.
49:13
So all of those resources are available on the website. Make smart choices for your mid-century siding, and you will basically have set up your house for excellent curb appeal. That’s the baseline of a house that feels charming or a house that feels bland, is a house that is letting its siding do the most, not just keep the weather out, but look charming and mid-century as well. You’ve been listening to Episode 2212.
49:38
And I will be back with you next week to share a really great interview the second half of my chat recently with Jim Drzewiecki of Ginkgo Leaf Studio, while we talk about winterizing and winter landscape design for mid-century houses. I think you’re going to find this one really good. See you then you.