Our Ramsey jobIs LP SmartSide a good replacement for vinyl siding on a Ramsey home?
It can be, if it is installed as a system. On our Ramsey job the owners replaced blue-gray vinyl with LP SmartSide engineered wood lap siding in a matching blue, and the crew cut and fit every board on site, including the tall chimney chase. Engineered wood reads like painted wood from the street and is thicker and more rigid than typical vinyl, but it needs correct clearances, flashing and sealed cuts.
The house is a two-story from Ramsey's newer subdivisions, with an attached three-car garage, a stone-wrapped front porch and a boxed chimney chase. In August 2018 our inspector walked the roof and chalk-marked hail hits on every slope, labeling the counts on the shingles, and photographed the gutters, downspouts, vents and vinyl siding on every wall. The owners picked siding colors from sample boards held up against the house that same month.
The siding went on in June 2019. Our photos show the old vinyl coming off down to the house wrap, the crew setting up a cutting station in the backyard, and new lap boards going up course by course around the windows, doors and the chimney chase. By July the new shingle roof was on, and our August 2019 drone flights show the finished house from every side.
Ramsey is a good fit for sturdier siding. The city sits on the Anoka Sand Plain, a flat, sandy plain with few windbreaks in the newer neighborhoods, and NOAA has recorded 3-inch hail near Ramsey on August 5, 2019. When a storm damages both the roof and the siding, planning them together, as this family did, avoids patching one while the other waits.