Siding Reviews

Ask any man who hangs fiber cement and he will tell you the same thing, whoever designed it never carried a sheet of it across a windy yard. It is heavy, it snaps if you look at it wrong, and the dust will eat you alive if you cut it stupid. I am picky about it anyway, because I have torn off too many walls where the last crew nailed it wherever their arm landed and called it done. The trouble was selling that. A homeowner would sit there with my fiber cement price in one hand and a vinyl price in the other and ask me why the numbers were not close, like I was charging extra for fun. Our website finally does that explaining before I get to the kitchen table. It has our houses on it, the materials side by side in plain words, and pictures close enough that you can see the trim work. A couple a few towns over told me they spent an evening on it and by the time I measured their house they had already picked their material and just wanted to know if I was the man in the pictures. I was. We hung their house in October and I did not spend one minute arguing about vinyl. That hour I did not spend arguing is worth more to me than the job almost. Almost.

Doug is my partner. He has hung siding since he was nineteen. I run the office and the part nobody wants, calling people back when something is wrong. Doug has one flaw that costs us money. He will not badmouth another man's work, even looking straight at it. We open a wall, find trim nailed into rot or edges nobody sealed, and Doug just goes quiet and starts taking pictures. Then the homeowner calls me to say it out loud. I was the bad news department. The reviews changed who does that talking. After every job the ask goes out and customers write the details Doug would never say. One man wrote we found his rotted sheathing, showed him the pictures, fixed it before a panel went up, and sealed each cut edge like the warranty depended on it, because it does. Doug said it is the first time in thirty years the work got to talk before he had to.

Here is the math nobody tells you when you start a siding crew. As long as I am on the wall, we fly. The day I step off to run estimates and put out fires, the work slows to about half and the corners start getting creative, and not in a good way. I spent two years being the foreman, the salesman, and the complaint department, and wondering why I could not grow past the size of my own two hands. My best installer kept telling me, boss, the work is here, you just cannot be the one hanging it. What got us over that hump was the street doing the selling. Our finished houses get posted now, whole elevations, not just a pretty front, and in these neighborhoods a good re-side is contagious. We did a house on a street across town in the spring, and by August we had done two more on the same street and measured a fourth, all from people who watched the first one go up and then saw it again on their phones that night. I hired a real foreman in June, a man the crew listens to because he can out hang all of them. I still walk every job before the last check. But most days now I am running a company, not racing my own crew up a ladder.

My dad Kurt hangs the siding. I took over the phones and the booking last spring, and the first thing I watched was his forty minute drive problem. He would go measure a house and find the whole appointment was a man wanting a price for the one wall his grill melted. The booking on the website asks what I never could without sounding rude. Full house or one wall, pictures if they have them, a real time picked by them. Last month four appointments in a row were real full house conversations. Dad said to write that down somewhere. So I am.

I have hung siding for twenty six years and I still answer a phone like a man being interrupted mid sentence, because I usually am. Half the time I am on a ladder with a panel in one hand and wind doing whatever it wants with the other end. My wife used to say the business would grow the day I stopped sounding annoyed that it rang. She was not wrong, she was just early. What changed is the calls do not land on me anymore. A voice picks up day and night, asks what is going on with the house, and books the measure like she has done it ten thousand times. Customers mention her in reviews by name, like she works the front desk. One man wrote she talked him through picking colors until he calmed down. I have never talked a man through colors calmly in my life. A lady whose house we did in September told my foreman she called three siding companies and we were the only one where a person, her word, actually answered. She said that is why we got the job before I ever measured a wall. I still climb the ladder. I just do not climb down it for the phone anymore.

I am a one woman estimating department, which means when I am under a gable looking at rotted sheathing, every call I miss is a job somebody else measures first. Siding homeowners call three companies and take the first one who sounds real. Now the second a call goes unanswered, that person gets a text from my number asking what the house needs. Half the time I climb down and the conversation is already sitting there, address, material, when they are home. I do want the work. I just cannot be in two places at once, and now I do not have to be.

My husband Earl measures every house himself and types like the keyboard insulted him. Folks would message the website about a re side and he would get to it Sunday, maybe. Now those messages get answered right away, with the right questions. He told our son he wishes it could swing a hammer half as good as it books a job.

Ray and I started this company in his garage eleven years ago. He hangs, I sell and run the office, which used to mean four places a customer could reach us and I checked all four badly. On a big re side, looking scattered in week one kills you. Everything lands in one place now. One screen, every call, text, message, and email, tied to the job. Ray can open it from a scaffold and see exactly what I promised about the trim. A couple across the river told us they picked us partly because whoever answered already knew their house. Ray said it is the first time our office has been as tight as our corners. He does not compliment the office. I wrote it down.

Forty years in this trade and I never once asked a customer for a review. Felt like begging. My son told me the companies beating me to the good re sides had pages of reviews saying what my customers say to my face. The ask goes out on its own after the last walk through, while the yard is still clean and the homeowner is still happy. A man a couple towns over wrote three paragraphs about our trim work and how we sealed every cut edge. Customers have shaken my hand for years and never said half that. Now they say it where the next homeowner reads it.

Dad started this company before I was born and he reads every review out loud at the shop like the morning paper, the good ones twice. Answering them used to be my job, squeezed between ordering material and arguing with the yard about a missing box of corners. Some sat for a month. A thank you that takes a month is not a thank you. Replies go out now without me typing them, short and specific to the job. Dad still reads them out loud. Now half the time he is reading answers I did not write at two in the morning.

When I started, my advertising was a truck, a yard sign, and whatever the parts house let me pin on their board. Online we barely existed. Search siding in this town and you found the big franchises and two companies from the big city, and my Google listing had an old address from a shop we left in 2016 and one blurry picture of a ladder. Launchbarr rebuilt that listing from the studs out. Right address, right number, every service listed plain, real photos of our finished houses instead of that ladder. The calls started coming from the map, people right here in our county. A woman three streets over from a house we sided last fall said she picked our picture because the house in it looked like hers. We signed her in April. The good work was never the problem. Being findable was.

I run the office for two crews, which means I hear it when a customer cannot find us right. For years our name was spelled three ways across the internet, one phone number was the owner cell from 2014, and another listing sent people to a rental house we used as a shop one winter. Homeowners called angry that nobody answered a number nobody has. Launchbarr made every listing match, same name, address, and phone, everywhere a customer might look. A gentleman last month apologized for doubting we were still in business. His words. I told him the business was fine. It was the signposts that were lost.

I do good work and my old website did not. It had a stock photo of a house I never sided and words that could have been about anybody. The new one is our houses, our trim, close enough to count the nails. A man in the next town over hired us because he could see the corners. Siding is corners. Ours finally look like it.

My wife Ingrid owns this company outright. She started it estimating for a general contractor who kept sending her his worst siding jobs, and one day she decided the worst jobs should at least pay her. I run a crew for her, which makes me an employee with opinions, and I watched her lose work for ten years to companies that are not better, just easier to find. We had nothing for the towns around here. A homeowner in the next town or the one past it searched for siding in their town and we were not in the conversation, even though we drive through both every week. Launchbarr built pages for the towns we actually work, real pages about the houses there, the older vinyl failing on the north sides, the farmhouses with three additions in three different materials. Calls started coming from those towns by name. A couple out that way told Ingrid they read the page about their exact style of house twice before calling, and came to the estimate already trusting her on the material question, which is normally a forty minute argument. She told me that night the internet finally sends her the jobs she was already driving past. That is the happiest I have seen her about paperwork she never touched.

Color is where my estimates used to die. A couple would love the price, love the crew, then spend three weeks unable to pick between two grays, with me driving back out holding sample boards like a waiter. By the third trip the job quietly becomes next year. Now homeowners book their own measure on my calendar and pick a real time. A woman a few towns over said she chose us because booking felt like a company that had done this before. Her words were, you seemed organized before you ever saw my house. In siding, organized before the tear off is the whole sale.

My partner Tony measures, I run the crews, and between us we used to lose two or three jobs a season to simple no shows, ours and theirs. A homeowner takes the morning off, my estimator sits in an empty driveway, everybody is mad and nobody rebooks. On a full re side that is a big ticket to lose to a calendar mix up. Reminders now go out on their own. A lady in the next town told Tony we were the first contractors who treated her morning like it cost money. It does, hers and ours. We signed that house, and the neighbor watched the install and signed in July.

Down here a siding estimate has a two day shelf life. The homeowner gets three numbers, the heat is chewing through their old Masonite, and whoever explains his price first and clearest usually gets the signature. I used to hand write estimates at the truck and type them up at night, three days later. Mine go out by text while I am still in the driveway now, material named, trim named, the rot allowance spelled out honest. A man a couple towns over called back in twenty minutes and we started his house the next week. Slow paperwork was costing me jobs my hands had already won.

Stan gives a fair price and then never chases it. Says if they wanted it they would call. The follow ups go out on their own now, polite, spaced out, no begging. Three of those dead spring estimates signed in June from messages Stan never sent. I just enjoyed supper.

I am the second generation here. Dad builds it, I am learning to run it, and the thing I kept stepping on was deposits. Dad is old school, a handshake and a start date, and he thought asking for money up front said we did not trust people. The deposit link changed the argument. The customer signs, the deposit lands by card before a single panel is ordered, and nobody has blinked since we started. One customer paid hers from her phone in the driveway before I got back to the truck. Dad still shakes the hand. He will shake it at gunpoint. But he told a man at the supply house the link is the first office idea I brought him that pays rent. Coming from him, that is a framed certificate.

Vermont winters are hard on siding and most of my customers are people whose houses I did ten or fifteen years ago, aging right along with me. I started offering a simple yearly plan, a wash, a walk around, caulk and small fixes before they become big ones, billed monthly so nobody faces a lump. The billing runs itself. Cards go through, receipts go out, and I get a list of whose plan is active before I plan the spring route. At my age the remembering is the expensive part, and the plan remembers for me.

I am the office, which in a North Dakota siding company means I do contracts in a parka half the year. Our old process was a paper contract signed at a kitchen table, driven back, scanned by me three days later. One lost contract on a fiber cement job cost us a deposit argument I do not care to repeat. The agreement goes to the customer phone, gets signed there, and I have the copy before he is back on the highway. A homeowner across the river said it was the first contract she ever read all the way through, because it was on the thing she reads everything on.

My brother Cole and I run this together, and for years the company lived in a spiral notebook in his truck and a second, sadder notebook in mine. Jobs promised, jobs we owed a call, all in pencil, some in weather. When one of us was out sick, the other was just guessing with confidence. Every job sits on one board now, so I can stand in a driveway two towns over and know what Cole told a man in the next town yesterday. Cole said the board is the first partner he has had who writes everything down. I took that as praise for the board, not a review of me.

I am organized in the field and a disaster in the office, and I will say it before my office manager does. Estimates I meant to chase sat under invoices. The system keeps the list now. Every morning it tells the office who needs a follow up, whose material is in, whose deposit has not landed, no sticky notes involved. My manager Pat runs her day off that list. A customer in a nearby town said he signed partly because we were the only company that called when we said we would, three times running. I did not have the heart to tell him a list has better manners than I do. The work was always good. Now the follow through looks like the work.

I am not taking pictures of my jobs and putting them on the internet. That was my position for years, while my daughter rolled her eyes hard enough to see her own brain. Finished houses go out on their own now from the job photos, whole house, before and after. The houses do the talking and I do the siding. Correct division of labor.