Posted by Two houses, same age, same siding, ten kilometres apart. One is halfway through a quiet suburban block with neighbours on both sides. The other sits on an open property with fields around it.
Twenty years later they are not in the same condition, and the difference isn’t maintenance.
Shelter is a building material
Rain falling straight down is a minor problem for a wall. Rain driven sideways by wind is a different load entirely. It gets into laps and joints. It finds its way behind trim. It reaches places a vertical drip never would.
A house in a tight subdivision is shielded by everything around it. A house in open country takes the full hit, on the same wall, every winter. The south and west walls often look a decade older than the north side of the same home.
The climate here is not gentle
This part of the Fraser Valley gets serious rainfall, and it arrives in long wet stretches rather than short bursts. Walls here spend months of the year wet and get limited chances to dry out.
Wet is survivable. Wet without a drying cycle is what breaks things.
Where the older housing sits
A lot of the homes along the older corridors here date from the 1970s and 1980s. That puts them well before the 2006 requirement for a drainage gap behind cladding in coastal areas. No gap means whatever gets past the siding sits against the sheathing until it finds another way out, which it usually doesn’t.
Add exposure to that and you get the pattern people describe. Brittle cracked panels. Soft spots at the base of walls. Paint that stops holding no matter how carefully it goes on.
Repair or replace
Concentrated damage on one wall is a repair. Spread-out damage, warping, and repeated paint failure point the other way. On an exposed property, damage starts on the weather side and then spreads. Timing matters more than usual here.
A siding replacement company working here treats a full replacement as a wall rebuild, not a cosmetic swap. Old cladding comes off to the sheathing. Rot gets repaired. A drainage gap goes in where none existed. Then the new siding. Terms are zero deposit, in-house crews, and a 25-year workmanship warranty signed by the company and the installer.
Outbuildings are worth including in the conversation too. Shops, barns, and detached garages take the same weather as the house. They usually get less attention, so they often fail first and quietly.
One practical note
WorkSafeBC requires a hazardous materials survey by a qualified person before any renovation or demolition that could disturb them. There’s no build-year cutoff, though older homes are the likeliest to turn something up. On acreages with outbuildings, ask whether the survey covers the structures you actually want worked on. It’s a cheap question that prevents an awkward delay.
And if you’re getting quotes, ask each contractor which wall they’d start with. Anyone who’s looked properly will have an opinion. If you want the numbers behind the exposure argument, Environment and Climate Change Canada publishes climate normals station by station, including the local rainfall totals.