Bradford Siding, Soffit and Fascia

This is a partial reclad, and it is worth being clear about that rather than selling it as a whole-house job. The buff brick on the ground floor was sound and it stayed. Everything above it came off: the upper storey, the gable ends and the returns around the garage, along with the soffit, fascia and trim.

You can see the split in the first photograph. Brick to the underside of the second floor, new horizontal siding above, and black trim tying the two together at the joint. On a side-split like this that line is already a natural break in the elevation, which is what makes a partial reclad work here. On a plain two-storey box it usually does not, and we will say so.

The seventh and eighth photographs show the old cladding stacked on the lawn. Stripping back to the sheathing is the only way to see what the wall has been doing for the last twenty years, and it is the difference between a reclad and a cover-up.

The fifth photograph is the one we would pick if we could only keep one. That white sheet over the sheathing above the garage door is Typar building wrap, and on a finished house you will never see it again.

Siding is not waterproof and it was never meant to be. Wind drives rain through the laps, around window heads and behind trim, and every cladding system assumes some water gets past. What decides whether that matters is the drainage plane behind it: a continuous wrap, lapped shingle-fashion so water runs down and out rather than in, and properly integrated at the openings.

This is the layer that gets skipped when a quote is cheap. It is invisible the day the job finishes and it is the entire reason the wall is still dry in ten years. When you compare siding quotes, ask what goes on behind the cladding and how the wrap is detailed at the windows. A contractor who has to think about the answer has told you something.

It would have been cheaper to replace only the worst walls. We quoted the upper storey in full instead, for a reason that has nothing to do with upselling.

Cladding fades. Twenty years of sun does not fall evenly on a house, so the south and west walls lose more colour than the north, and a new panel in the same nominal shade will not match the wall it sits beside. Manufacturers change their colour ranges too, so on a house of this age the original profile is often simply not made any more. Patch one elevation and the repair is the first thing anyone sees from the street.

The other half of it is the joint. Every time you stop a run of new cladding against old, you create a transition that has to be flashed and sealed, and that transition is a maintenance item forever. Fewer joints is fewer things to fail. If a repair is genuinely the right call we quote a repair, and we will show you the wall we opened up to get there rather than asking you to take it on trust. Siding replacement should have to earn the job.

Our published ranges, per square foot of wall area, installed. Wall area, not floor area, which is the single most common mix-up when people compare quotes.

A two-storey carrying roughly 2,500 square feet of wall lands somewhere between $10,000 and $32,000 depending on which material you pick. On a partial reclad like this one the wall area is obviously lower, but the price per square foot tends to run slightly higher, because you are paying for the same setup, scaffolding and trailer across fewer squares.

Three things move a Simcoe County number inside these bands: how much of the house is being done, how many openings and returns there are to trim, and what the crew finds once the old cladding is off. Our comparison of siding materials in Ontario reads the warranties line by line, which is where vinyl and engineered wood actually separate.

Bradford sits immediately south of Innisfil and shares its weather. The nearest Environment Canada station publishing thirty year normals is at Cookstown, inside the Town of Innisfil, and it records snow falling on 63.9 days a year against 31.7 at King in York Region, with freezing rain on 7.9 days against 3.7.

That is the argument for doing the wrap and the flashing properly here. It is not the depth of a single storm, it is sixty-odd freeze and thaw cycles a year working at every lap and every joint. A wall that would be fine in the Greater Toronto Area gets a harder time thirty minutes north of it.

We work across Simcoe County and York Region out of a yard in Gormley. If you are nearby, the Innisfil page has the local climate and permit detail, and there is another completed Simcoe job in the portfolio.