Air and WRB with Vinyl Siding and Rigid Insulation
I’m about to side our 1930’s 1000 sq ft cape code home in Central Maine (climate zone 6). It’s 2×4 construction with dense pack cellulose in the walls. The siding is currently cedar singles that has potential of lead based paint. The current plan is to rip the old siding off and install vinyl siding. I do have RRP (lead safe) certification to do this.
I’ve also thought of just going over it with insulation and vinyl as well to avoid the hazardous work of the tear down.
I’m considering adding 1.5 inches of rigid poly iso insulation and installing vinyl siding directly through the foam into the sheathing using long roofing nails. I’ve found that adding this foam does greatly make the wrb details more complex.
There are couple of details that I’ve been struggling with:
-The main house has vinyl replacement windows that are in good condition so we cannot pull those out to the exterior to do an outie window. Should I temporarily pull those out to flash around the replacement window to water proof it?
-Since we are keeping these windows, is the WRB barrier against the sheathing or outside of the foam a better option?
-The old house obviously has 1x boards as it’s sheathing making air sealing difficult. What is the best way here to cut down on the air leakage here? Tape the insulation board? Pay for an expensive peal and stick?
-Do you get an electrician or the utility to float the power meter and wire while you side that area of the house? The house will be lived in during this project.
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I'm bumping this up again to see if I can get any feedback.
I made a call to the utility. They come out and float the meter for free so we can put vinyl siding behind it.
Need to do a disconnect and reconnect for the part where the utility wire attaches at the top of the wall once we get to that point.
I am also interested in an answer to your questions around the installed windows and retrofitting to your new air and drainage layer.
For my home, I've come to think that removing, properly integrating the rough opening and reinstalling is the most effective option as I work to address the goals of structural resiliency (adding hurricane ties to rafters & checking/adding on foundation anchors, replacing moldy early generation exterior gypsum sheathing with 3/4" plywood), air sealing (sheathing, foundation to sill plate, windows, etc) and insulating with 2 x 1.5" of Comfortbatt 80.
Have you considered using furring strips to reduce the number of penetrations in your WRB as well as the amount of thermal bridging.
Hi Andrew,
Hoping others will chime in here as well. One thing I might recommend: When the utility comes in to pull the meter, if they can open it up for you, might be worth mounting the meter box to a plywood backer (painted, etc) so that when you reattach it, you're really just reattaching the wood backer to the house. This would give you a bit of play and some leeway in overall thickness, in case you have to do anything behind the meter again.
Would also probably be worth doing some tests on the paint to see if it does contain lead. If it does, you know how to remove the existing siding safely; if it doesn't, you know you can remove the existing quickly without having to be as fastidious. A few inexpensive tests (pretty cheap at any big box store) could save you a lot of time, effort, and worry.
If you're not replacing the vinyl replacement windows, you probably can pull them, waterproof the openings, and reinstall them pretty similarly to how you'd install a new construction window. Not ideal, but probably better than the current install. If you expect to be replacing these windows down the line, stripping the siding and doing everything as right as you can will probably make that future work much easier to integrate.
I guess it depends on how far you want to take this and what your end goals are? Stripping siding would certainly allow you to gain the maximum benefits from the work you're doing, though of course doing everything as "right" as possible is more work, time, and money.