Evaluating full siding replacement vs repair vs partial replacement... any help?

[ender]

My house currently has three sidings on it. Cedar shake, vinyl, and wood siding. My guesstimate for what happened was the house (built around 1980) originally had the wood/shake combo but at some point previous owners replaced about 1/2 of the wood with vinyl. The vinyl seems somewhat new (maybe 3-5 years old?). Roughly 2700 squarefeet of total exterior siding.

Now, there is woodpecker damage to some of the wood siding in several places. We're trying to figure out what to do because while we could patch the damage, a good number of the wood pieces themselves are also in need of repair.

It seems like we could:

• Replace all the siding (neither myself or my spouse like the shake look but it seems sad to tear off a bunch of vinyl that's newish....)
• Replace just the wood areas in need of repair

It's not clear to me the best approach. We have several quotes, one to just replace the wood siding and repaint the 1/2 of the house that's wood (~$3.5k ish). We also have a couple quotes to replace all the siding (11.2k and 15k) and a couple options on replacing all the soffits/fascia/gutters too.

The full replacement of everything (gutters, fascia/soffits, all 4 sides for siding) would be about $20k. The cheaper quote uses Norandex instead of Tyvex, which I've never heard of before and information online is really lacking about (?), as well as a slightly lower grade of siding.

I'm leaning towards just replacing everything but I'm not sure how to best evaluate what makes sense. Our house is worth around $250k at this point. We probably will be there a while yet, though it's hard to know.

What recommendations do folks here have?

[radram]

Why can't you just "upgrade" the wood parts to vinyl?

Also, the whole 2700 sq ft job would be about $1500-$2500 in entry level to second tier materials. I have never done a siding job, but it is on my bucket list of jobs I want to tackle someday.

I bet for about $1000 you could buy the materials and tools for just the wood part, try to DIY, and if you fail, go back to your material store(Home Depot, etc.) and ask for a reference of someone that can finish it for you. $20,000 sounds very high to me. I simply would not pay that much.

Are you at all handy? Maybe now is a great time to start to be.

Keep us posted.

[ender]

Why can't you just "upgrade" the wood parts to vinyl?

Also, the whole 2700 sq ft job would be about $1500-$2500 in entry level to second tier materials. I have never done a siding job, but it is on my bucket list of jobs I want to tackle someday.

I bet for about $1000 you could buy the materials and tools for just the wood part, try to DIY, and if you fail, go back to your material store(Home Depot, etc.) and ask for a reference of someone that can finish it for you. $20,000 sounds very high to me. I simply would not pay that much.

Are you at all handy? Maybe now is a great time to start to be.

Keep us posted.

We could upgrade just the wood, but we'd end up with another type of vinyl and still mismatch siding. The fascia is still wood too (and has damage). If money was no object I also wouldn't mind having the siding look nicer as shakes are fugly imo and neither of us likes the mix/color.

My biggest concern with DIY is that I have a pretty meaningful fear of heights. Doing work above ground is incredibly uncomfortable for me.

$20k would be to replace everything btw - siding, fascia, soffits, and gutters. Not just siding. If we knew we'd stay here for 5+ years we probably would do this route.

[radram]

Why can't you just "upgrade" the wood parts to vinyl?

Also, the whole 2700 sq ft job would be about $1500-$2500 in entry level to second tier materials. I have never done a siding job, but it is on my bucket list of jobs I want to tackle someday.

I bet for about $1000 you could buy the materials and tools for just the wood part, try to DIY, and if you fail, go back to your material store(Home Depot, etc.) and ask for a reference of someone that can finish it for you. $20,000 sounds very high to me. I simply would not pay that much.

Are you at all handy? Maybe now is a great time to start to be.

Keep us posted.

We could upgrade just the wood, but we'd end up with another type of vinyl and still mismatch siding. The fascia is still wood too (and has damage). If money was no object I also wouldn't mind having the siding look nicer as shakes are fugly imo and neither of us likes the mix/color.

My biggest concern with DIY is that I have a pretty meaningful fear of heights. Doing work above ground is incredibly uncomfortable for me.

$20k would be to replace everything btw - siding, fascia, soffits, and gutters. Not just siding. If we knew we'd stay here for 5+ years we probably would do this route.

I see. The height thing is a deal breaker for me as well. In fact, 1 story ranch only for me for this very reason.

As far as the mis-match siding, that stuff does not matter at all to me. Of course the bigger issue is, has the woodpecker problem been permanently resolved? If not, repairing wood with more wood is just not an option for me, so I wood(see what I did there?) remove that as a viable option.

[ender]

There's not much you can do permanently about woodpeckers.

I guess the problem is if you ever have the paint not good enough, bugs get under the paint (previous owners must have had this happen). We put up some tape this year which sorta worked?

[radram]

There's not much you can do permanently about woodpeckers.

Concrete??? :)

[ender]

There's not much you can do permanently about woodpeckers.

Concrete??? :)

If I lived in the country I have permanent solutions for each individual woodpecker.... :|

[fuzzy math]

If you're possibly selling in the next couple years having the nicer stuff may make it easier to sell, although there are no guarantees that you'll get every $$ back out of it.

I bought a home a few years back with a FHA loan, and on the inspection they found spongy wet ruined sideboards (from a product that had been known to have been recalled in the 90s). FHA would not allow the loan to go through until it was fixed. Cue tons of back and forth with the sellers... Some people would have walked on the offer, but we were in a tight market. I have no idea if your woodpecker damage is bad enough, but some inspectors can certainly augment things to the level of where a buyer would freak out. And multiple partial replacements can leave people wondering what happened to the home that its had many partial repairs.

[ender]

If you're possibly selling in the next couple years having the nicer stuff may make it easier to sell, although there are no guarantees that you'll get every $$ back out of it.

I bought a home a few years back with a FHA loan, and on the inspection they found spongy wet ruined sideboards (from a product that had been known to have been recalled in the 90s). FHA would not allow the loan to go through until it was fixed. Cue tons of back and forth with the sellers... Some people would have walked on the offer, but we were in a tight market. I have no idea if your woodpecker damage is bad enough, but some inspectors can certainly augment things to the level of where a buyer would freak out. And multiple partial replacements can leave people wondering what happened to the home that its had many partial repairs.

This is kinda a thing I've been thinking about too, there's value in that.