JAY SEVERIN & VINYL SIDING

“For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” (2 Corinthians 5:1)

There’s an ad for a new home improvement product running on WTKK 96.9/Boston’s Talk Evolution which BUGS me!  The copy is read by Jay Severin. The ad is for a new product which LOOKS like exterior paint but is many, many times better.  According to the ad, once you apply this product to the exterior of your home, it will essentially last for a lifetime and will look great.  On the one hand, that certainly sounds like a good product.  On the other hand, Jay Severin “disses” vinyl siding in the ad and that’s what I don’t like.

In his elitist condescending manner, he states,. “You weren’t raised to live in a house WRAPPED IN PLASTIC!”  

Jay is not the only vinyl siding snob.  In the past ten years or so, in certain snobby architectural circles, vinyl siding has come to be seen as very low class; tasteless; ugly; detrimental to a neighborhood; and essentially on the level of one of those awful silver 1950s fake Christmas trees.  I have a friend who lives in a fairly high end subdivision in a Dallas, Texas subdivision where vinyl siding is NOT allowed.

As you might guess, I live in a house which is covered in vinyl siding!  The house is church owned.  It’s in a neighborhood of mostly older homes on Framingham’s southside.  The house was built around 1892.  The church bought it for use as a “parsonage” (that is, minister’s residence) in 1946.  Admittedly, the house has its drawbacks.  There’s only one bathroom, and the way the house is laid out, it would be almost impossible to add even an additional half bath.  There is no garage.  The cellar is your basic pre-1930s stone nightmare.  All that said, the house doesn’t look too bad.  When we came in 1987, the house was sided in that awful asbestos or asphalt or whatever it was...sort of shiny, jagged, multi colored but mostly gray ”siding” of circa the 1940s...maybe earlier.  It looked awful....and that stuff is actually hazardous to your health and highly flammable.  In 1988. the church hired a contractor to remove that old siding, and side the house with modern vinyl siding.  (Under the siding were white clapboards....mostly in good condition...but obviously the house would need to be painted every threeyears if left that way, and that would make no economic sense.)  The gray vinyl siding has (mostly) held up well.  A tree did fall against the side of the house in 1995 and tore a small rip in the siding which is still there but not very visible.  The siding is not perfect, but I’m not ashamed of it.  I’d say at least half of the houses in our neighborhood are vinyl sided.  Granted, this is mostly a blue-collar southside neighborhood, but in driving around Framingham on Sunday I noticed that probably a third of all single-family homes in all parts of town are vinyl sided.  I’d say probably 10% of them look awful.  I’d say probably 10% of them look “just O.K.”.  BUT,. I’d say probably 80% of them look REALLY NICE.

Back in the ‘80s I had a friend who was twenty years older than me who was a builder.  (He’s retired now and lives in Millis.)  “Bill” built scores of medium-end and high-end new homes in Canton, Westwood, Walpole, and Sharon in the 1970s and 1980s.  All of his BRAND NEW HOMES were vinyl sided!  Once the houses were enclosed in plywood, they were insulated and covered with vinyl siding.  The jobs were very well done.  It really LOOKED like wood.  You’d have to get up close to really touch and examine the homes to see that it was actually vinyl.  I don’t know how those homeowners would follow Jay Severin’s advice because their houses were vinyl sided from new...and AGAIN, Jay, in medium-end and high-end suburban neighborhoods!

My sister lives in the house we grew up in over in Canton.  My father loved red and so the house was painted red from it’s beginning in 1958.  The house looked FANTASTIC when newly painted.  But after three years it would be faded and peeling.  After five years, it looked disgraceful  Many of you know that each of our parents passed away in 2000.  At that time, the house had not been painted for well over ten years.  It looked TERRIBLE.  The house was  also surrounded by a six-foot wooden fence painted red.  Dianne had the house vinyl sided in yellow and had the fence spray-painted a forest green which really goes well with the yellow.  Do you think any of her neighbors in that nice neighborhood in Canton have complained about the vinyl siding? NO!  In fact, she’s constantly receiving compliments about the house.  It also looks pretty “real” until you get real close.  It looks 100% better than it did with peeling red paint.

I hope the people from First Congregational Church in Hopkinton don’t shoot me, but in all fairness, First Congregational (built in the 1990s with an addition a couple of years ago) kind of supports Jay’s argument.  It was done with the “Bill” the builder method of having vinyl siding right from new.  The vinyl siding is white.  It’s just NOT a good job.  It LOOKS like vinyl siding, and in my opinion is not hung well in some areas.  In some places on the exterior of the building the shades of white don’t even look exactly the same.  I’ve often thought they should have spent a bit more money and had a brick exterior (or at least a fake-brick exterior) or had a painted wooden exterior.  It’s a great church and a nice facility, but that’s just my opinion.  

Yup, the house I live in is wrapped in plastic and I love it!