Re-Siding with Hardie After a Hailstorm

James Hardie Siding in Stony Plain

After a hail storm in Spruce Grove and Stony Plain, hundreds of homes were left with damaged vinyl siding. At Blue Jay Exterior Renovations, insurance siding projects are not the core of our business: this is because we’d rather get our projects by consulting with homeowners than by schmoozing with insurance companies.

Every contractor should be focusing on what’s best for their customer. For us, that’s the homeowner, but for insurance company’s “recommended contractors”, it’s the insurance company that gets the best treatment.

For this project in Stony Plain, the homeowner removed the damaged vinyl siding before we arrived. We asked them to leave their old tar paper in place to help protect against moisture while we waited to get started, and we removed it completely as we worked our way around the project. The customers selected HardiePlank lap siding in Iron Gray with colour matching corner trims and black trims at their windows and doors. Iron Gray vertical board and batten on the front gable and the small kitchen bay window bring a subtle accent that doesn’t overpower the design.

The cultured stone (installed separately by a mason) was the perfect choice to finish off the design. Here’s a small thing to look for in the project photos: we cut the vertical window trims o the bay window down to a width of 2 inches down from the factory width of 3.5 inches. This subtle change gave the masons an extra 3 inches of space to work with at the corners, which allows the stone to occupy that much more space in the viewer’s eye.

Remember what I was saying about the insurance company’s recommended contractor? Well, there was one working on the house next door to us on this job.

Here are a few things that we noticed:

·         An unsafe work platform that doesn’t meet any kind of safety standards

·         The contractor didn’t install a new weather barrier; they just reused the old tarpaper (which didn’t even cover the whole wall originally)

·         Contractor didn’t re-seal or flash the windows in any way

·         Contractor was missing for days at a time, and took about a week to install siding on just this one wall.

If you have an insurance claim for your siding and your insurance company is recommending their “preferred contractor”, just remember to think about the experience you will have during your renovation project.