Siding Repair in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland

Across the Lower Mainland, the thing that damages siding is rarely the siding. Between October and April a wall here can stay wet for weeks, and coastal wind drives that rain into joints that were never meant to see water sideways. The cracked board or soft corner you can see is the receipt. The water path that produced it is the problem.

That changes how we scope a repair. Before anything comes off, our foreman asks where water is getting in and where it is going. The stain on the siding is often well below the entry point: a failed window head flashing, a plugged gutter or a missing kickout dumping a roof's worth of water onto one strip of wall. A repair that swaps the board and leaves the water path alone is a repair you pay for twice.

It also means we open past the visible damage, because rot hides under paint that still looks fine. On the 1970s to 1990s housing stock in Burnaby and the Tri-Cities, and on older East Van homes built before the rainscreen era, the building paper behind the cladding was often never going to drain, so a moisture symptom there earns a look at the sheathing.

Vinyl cracks on cold impact days and lets go in wind, and the cause is nearly always the same: it was nailed too tight and could not move. A cracked panel is replaced, never glued. A zip tool unlocks the course above, the new panel locks in with play, and we refasten the surrounding courses through the slot centres, because one new panel on a tight-nailed wall just tees up the next one for the next storm.

Cedar and wood rot where water lingers: bottom courses, unsealed board ends, behind the hydrangea, and on shaded North Shore walls that dry slowly under canopy. Wood is also the most repairable cladding there is. Boards can be milled and shingles woven to match almost any profile. We cut back to sound wood, seal the end grain, and meter the wall before closing it.

Aluminum does not rot. Its failures are dents, chalking and a colour coat worn to bare metal. Residential profiles left the market a generation ago, so replacement lengths come from salvage or from a hidden elevation of your own house, and straight, tight aluminum is often best served by a disciplined repaint.

Fiber cement almost never fails on its own. When we are called to damaged Hardie, the cause is the install: nails driven wrong, clearances missing, butt joints tight with no gap. The fix is correcting those details, not just swapping the board. Its core profiles and colours have stayed unusually stable for decades, so a later repair is usually simple.

We do not publish repair prices because every wall is different, but the structure of the number is stable. Access comes first. A ground-floor panel is a different job from a gable end on a North Shore slope that needs staging.

Material and availability come next. A stock vinyl colour is a quick swap. A discontinued profile means a hunt through surviving stock and the salvage market, and custom-milled cedar carries a setup cost, so it pays to bundle every board you know about into one visit. Finish work follows the same logic: a spot blend is small, a repaint of the whole elevation to erase a mismatch is not.

Then the trim and flashing. The board you called about is often fed by a rotated head flashing, a flattened kickout or a caulk joint that gave up. Those get their own small lines on the quote, so you can see what the repair actually fixed.

The biggest variable is what the opening reveals, and it is the one we cannot price from the driveway. The scope can grow from one board to one elevation, which is why the quote is built from what we measured on your wall, not from a phone description.

On a strata, repair-or-restore is a governance decision as much as a technical one, and we write the assessment so council can act on it. Where a townhome complex has aluminum that is straight and tight, the practical middle road is to refasten and repaint now while council plans recladding as a scheduled project rather than an emergency. Vinyl on the same complex gets refastened, and painting it is a narrower conversation: vinyl-safe product, lighter shades only. Where the envelope predates modern practice and leaks keep recurring, a depreciation report or envelope consultant will usually point at the assembly, and so will we, instead of quoting a patch.

A rental fourplex with tight-nailed vinyl loses panels every winter until the whole wall is refastened once, properly. Do it in September, before the wind arrives. We run that preventive pass for Lower Mainland rental portfolios each fall.

Insurance repairs run on a different clock. Sudden damage from wind, hail or a falling branch is commonly covered. Rot, fade and wear usually are not, and adjusters know the difference. Photograph everything before touching anything, tarp what is open, keep the blown-off panels because they prove your product, and keep receipts. A storm scope has to catch what the driveway view misses: cracked-but-attached panels, lifted head flashings, displaced fascia and the far elevation that took secondary strikes. We establish scope and cost. We never promise what an insurer will pay.

The rule we give clients: repair when the problem is on the wall, replace when the problem is in the wall. The hard part is reading which one you have.

The signals are consistent across materials. The same symptom on two or more elevations means the cause is shared, and you cannot patch your way out of a shared cause. A third call about the same wall in a few years is the wall telling you the patches are treatment, not cure. An unmatchable product on the front of the house turns every repair into a visible quilt.

The signal that overrides the rest is moisture behind the cladding: soft boards, staining that returns after cleaning, a musty room, or one window that weeps every winter. On a pre-rainscreen home in Burnaby or the Tri-Cities, that is no longer a siding question. The middle paths then beat another patch: replace the weather wall and repair the rest, replace the bottom courses and fix the clearances, or phase by elevation over two or three years, always breaking at corners. You get the verdict with photos, and a wall that can wait gets told to wait.