LESLIE: Now we’ve got Rika from rainy Oregon on the line looking to replace some siding. How can we help you?
RIKA: Hi. I’m calling to see if you can recommend the best siding for our climate.
TOM: OK.
RIKA: We’re out here in the Northwest where we get a lot of rain and wind. And our T1-11, the paint has been peeling off and it’s starting to kind of disintegrate.
LESLIE: Oh, yeah.
TOM: Yeah. It’s a high-maintenance siding, T1-11. And if you’re not familiar with it, for those that are listening, that’s a plywood siding. And it’s OK as long as you paint it every day before you go to work; otherwise, it does wear out quite quickly.
LESLIE: Now, when you’re talking about wind, Rika, are you saying that you get like super-duper-duper high winds like hurricane conditions? Like we should be looking at a certain mile-per-hour rating or just normal rainy/windy?
RIKA: I mean we did have one hurricane out here, so it survived through that and stuff.
TOM: You know what the nice thing about T1-11 is, though? It makes a really good sheathing. You don’t have to take it off to put siding over it.
LESLIE: Should you paint it and seal it and make sure it’s in good, coated condition?
TOM: No, no, no. You’re not going to rely on its weather resistance whatsoever; you’re just going to go right on top of it. So you could put a building paper or a Tyvek or something like that and go right over it.
And the kind of siding that I think is probably one of the most weather-resistant sidings out there is a siding called HardiePlank, which is a siding that’s a cementitious type of a siding product. It’s molded. It can look like clapboard, it can look like wood cedar shingles. I’ve got an 1886 house, Rika, and I’ve got on my house real, old-fashioned wood shingles on the house and on the garage, we have HardiePlank. And I’ve got to tell you, from the street, they pretty much look identical.
RIKA: Wow.
TOM: Because the HardiePlank is just so well-made and it has that appearance of being like an old shingle. But it’s not organic; it’s not wood, so it doesn’t fall apart. And we actually ordered them from the factory primed and painted, so it was a little bit more money but so worth it. Because when you factory-paint this stuff, you just do so much better of a job than you can possibly do on-site itself. So, I would definitely look at HardiePlank siding that’s made by the James Hardie Company as one of the options.
RIKA: OK. Thank you.
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