What Happens If You Find Rot Behind My Siding?

Thomas Williams, All American Renovations – Elite member of James Hardie™ ALLIANCE · Metro Atlanta and Middle Georgia

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We stop, we show you, and you decide.

That’s the whole answer, and the order of those three things matters more than any of them on their own. Nobody prices rot they can’t see. Any contractor who tells you his number covers whatever turns up behind your siding is either padding it heavily or hasn’t thought about it.

What you should be asking is not whether rot is possible. It’s what happens in the week after it’s found.

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Why Nobody Can Price This Up Front

A siding quote is a price for the siding. We measure your house, we price the material and the labor to put it on, and that number holds.

What we cannot price is the condition of the sheathing and framing underneath, because nobody has seen it since the day the siding went on. Not us, not your home inspector, not the last guy who painted it.

So there are two kinds of number on an exterior job, and you’re entitled to know which one you’re looking at:

• The scoped work — the siding, the trim, the labor. That’s a price, and it does not move.
• What’s behind it — unknown until the wall is open, priced only once it’s visible, and never without your sign-off.

If you want the inside version of this argument, how do you know a renovation quote won’t change once demolition starts is the same problem on an interior job. A document set prices what you can see. This page is about what you can’t.

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The House That Taught This Lesson Best

There’s a lake house we re-sided in Eatonton, on Lake Oconee, and it’s the clearest version of this I can give you.

Old cedar shake, the whole house, with the woodpecker problem cedar tends to get. The homeowners wanted James Hardie. They’d hoped to do the entire house in shake, and when that priced out higher than made sense we used HOVER to try other arrangements — shake as an accent in a few key places, board and batten where the house carried it, smooth lap everywhere else. We also pulled the front door, a single slab with a transom and sidelights, and set a custom eight-foot double door into the same opening.

Soffit and fascia weren’t in the job. They still aren’t — we didn’t replace them.

That was the job we signed. Then the shake came off.

There was rot at almost every exposed window that didn’t have something above it to keep the weather off. And the only thing between the shake and the sheathing was felt paper.

The whole project is here, before and after, if you want to see what came off and what went on.

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The Question That Costs Money Is The Second One

Finding rot at the windows is the easy part. It’s visible the moment the siding is down, and repairing it is routine.

The hard question is the one it raises. If water got in around the windows where the siding met them, what did it do where the stone butted up against the window trim — the part still covered, that nobody can see?

Here’s the sentence I use on every one of these, and it’s not a sales line, it’s just the arithmetic of water:

If you can see that kind of damage on the outside, what kind of damage do we already anticipate is going to be behind the siding?

On that house we took the trim off around a few of the windows where the stone met them, so the homeowners could look at the actual condition rather than at my opinion about it. There was rot behind those too.

Which is how a siding job turns into taking all of the stone off a house and putting it back — in that case ProVia Terra Cut in Niagara with gray grout.

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What We Won’t Do

We won’t permanently cover up rot we’ve found. Not with your sign-off, not at your request, not to keep a number down.

If a wall is open and there’s rot in it, that wall doesn’t get new siding until the rot is out. We’ll move the crew to another section of the house while you decide what to do about the parts that are still a question, so the job isn’t sitting still — but the wall we’ve already opened doesn’t get closed over.

That’s the one place on an exterior job where you don’t get to overrule me, and I’d rather say so plainly before you hire us than discover it with you in week three.

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So Does My Price Change Or Not?

Both, and the line between them is the thing to understand.

Our price is our price for the work we scoped. If the material costs us more than we thought, if it takes our crew longer than we planned, if we got something wrong — that’s ours. You don’t hear about it and you don’t pay for it. That holds on every job we do.

Rot is a different category. It isn’t a mistake in our pricing and it isn’t a surprise we created; it’s work that nobody on earth could have quoted with the siding still on the house. So it’s new work, it gets priced when it’s visible, and you decide whether and how it gets done.

On the interior side we put a number on that distinction and call it the No Builder Change Order Guarantee — our price holds, short of unforeseen rot or code conditions nobody can see until demolition starts. The exterior works the same way. The only honest version of a promise like that has that carve-out in it, and a contractor who leaves it out is making you a promise he’ll break.

What you should want is not a contractor who promises no change orders. It’s one who can tell you in advance exactly which two things would cause one.

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How The Conversation Actually Goes

Not by text message, and not with a form for you to sign.

Chris or I come and look at it with you, standing at the open wall. You see what we see. We tell you what has to happen, what’s optional, and what we’d do if it were our house. Then you get a price for that work before anybody touches it. Who’s actually going to be at my house explains who those people are.

And some of it is genuinely your call. On the lake house, once the walls were open the homeowners chose to do more — the deck boards on the front porch, the balcony above it that hadn’t been built right in the first place, the back deck boards and handrails. None of that was in the original job. They were treating the house as a long-term investment and didn’t want to take chances with it, and with everything already opened up it was the cheapest it would ever be to fix.

That’s a decision a homeowner should get to make with real information in front of them, which is the entire point of stopping and showing you.

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What Was Behind It Says Nothing About Who Built It

One more thing, because people get angry at the wrong target.

Felt paper behind wood siding is not a scandal. I’m not going to tell you what the code required when your house was built, because I’d be guessing and you’d have no way to check me. What I can tell you is what goes back on: a full weather-resistive barrier, because that’s what Georgia’s residential code calls for now, and because we wouldn’t do it another way regardless.

Contractors build what’s required of them. I’m not going to fault a man in 1990 for leaving out something no code asked him for.

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What I’d Tell You If You Called Me

• Assume there’s something. On a tear-off of any age, plan on finding a few areas. The houses with nothing behind them are the exception, not the rule.
• Look at the windows first, and especially any window with nothing above it keeping the rain off. That’s where water gets in on most houses.
• Ask your contractor what happens the day he finds rot — before you sign. Listen for whether there’s a process, or just a change order form.
• Ask what he’d do if there were rot behind something that’s still covered. The answer tells you whether he’ll show you or guess for you.
• Get the two categories separated on your quote — the scoped work, and the words covering what’s underneath. If it’s one undifferentiated number, ask which part of it is a promise.
• Nobody should be covering up rot you’ve both seen. If that’s on the table at any price, you have the wrong contractor.
• And if you want the number for the whole job, what siding replacement costs around here is where a rot repair sits as a line item.

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Want To Know What You’re Likely To Find?

We’ll walk your house and tell you what we can see, what we can’t see until the siding comes off, and which parts of your house we’d be worried about. We’re in Hampton, with a design center in Forsyth, and we work across Metro Atlanta and Middle Georgia.

If what’s under yours is hardboard rather than cedar, why is my Masonite siding crumbling and is it LP or Masonite are the two to read first.

Everything on this page comes from houses we’ve opened up ourselves. The only thing cited is Georgia’s own code page.

All American Renovations — (770) 629-0589