How Does Your Siding Hang?

There's apparently a little dust-up in Long Reach over a homeowner named Jim Rose who 16 years ago replaced his vertical wood siding with horizontal vinyl.

We took interest in this ExploreHoward post because we happened to also change the direction of our siding a few years back. We did it mostly because our contractor had a devil of a time finding vertical aluminum siding at a reasonable price. Really, we tried. But we guess they just don't make homes like they did in Columbia 40 years ago :)

Now, of course, we got permission in advance from our friendly, very professional and reasonable architectural review board (it helped that we brought photos of other homes in the wider neighborhood that had done something similar, to show we were not exactly setting a precedence).

Anyway from the post it seems the board ain't too happy about not being included in the decision-making:

Committee member Henry Dagenais, who also serves as the village’s representative on the Columbia Association Board of Directors, asked Rose why he didn’t ask for approval before installing the siding so long ago.

“It’s not going to be a decision everyone likes, no matter what we do,” Dagenais said. “The only thing that bothers me is you’ve lived here a long time and you knew the covenants existed. You should have followed them and then we wouldn’t be in this position. ... If we don’t follow the rules, then we need to pitch them out.”

Rose responded: “I imagine I thought it would be an OK thing to do,” because his street, Wingborne Court, includes houses with a mix of vertical and horizontal siding. Also, he said he felt something had to be done to fix his original siding, which rotted easily.