The weather has been so unpredictable lately. Storms are ripping through the area leaving paths of destruction. Many homes have had damaged that is too minor to file an insurance claim. In this case homeowners are on their own to make repairs. My home falls into this category. Not only do we have issues with flood waters occasionally, we live on a river, we have an abundance of large trees in our yard that storms wreak havoc with. The last heavy rain we had had brought several large branches down in are yard. One of them actually took a large chunk out of our siding. The storm damage to our home was minimal in comparison the tree that fell on our neighbor's car. We still had to take care of it but we were thankful it was something small to deal with. There are minor obstacles involved with the repair of siding. First you must make sure you purchase siding to match the existing color and size of the current siding. In our case this was not hard. The previous owner stored some in the garage. The only problem we had was that the coloring was a bit off due to the sun fading the house. Really not a huge problem for us because the area we were working on repairing was minimal. Many home maintenance stores will have siding samples that can be brought home for comparison. My spouse and I are novices when it comes to home repairs. We were able to use basic tools we already had for this job. The first thing we did was remove the broken pieces of siding. To do this we used a utility knife and a framing square. This provided a straight edge and gave us a guide for the knife. We cut the siding with an inch on both sides to spare and proceeded to pull it away from the house cutting it on the bottom. Snips area great tool to have on hand as well as a zip tool for home improvement projects. A zip tool can be used to go up the backside of the siding to remove the nails with the siding. We measured the piece of siding that came out and using our framing square and utility knife cut out a section of new siding to fill in the existing hole. We made sure our measurement include a half inch overlap on either side. Our thinking was that this would prevent any weather damage from occurring behind the siding because access would not be granted to water, snow or rain. Thankfully damage did not extend beyond the siding to the actual house. We were lucky that we did not uncover any deeper issues. The installation was super simple. We slid it into the area and tapped in a few roofing nails. The siding was good to go and blended fairly well considering that the house had been in the sun for awhile longer than the siding. If this problem exists for you and your issue is in a more noticeable spot on the house you may consider removing a piece of siding in a more inconspicuous spot to cover the damaged area. The older piece with camouflage right in around the other siding and the new piece will be somewhere inconspicuous. If after this reassurance that vinyl siding repair after storm damage is easy even for a novice you are not convinced call in a local handyman. This is a rather minor job that should be able to be completed in under an hour or two, depending on the size of the affected area. Storm damage is not preventable. However it is not always massive and can often be dealt with by an individual homeowner. Professionals are available to assist you if the storm damage that affects your home is more than just a piece of bunked up siding.
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