Siding Replacement on Alabama Hill, Bellingham

Siding for Alabama Hill's View Homes

Climb Alabama Street out of the Lettered Streets and you reach one of Bellingham's classic postwar neighborhoods: ranches, split-levels, and daylight-basement homes from the 1960s and 70s, many of them angled to catch the view over Bellingham Bay toward Lummi Island. That view carries a cost. Weather off the bay drives rain into the west- and south-facing walls of these houses for half the year, and the original cladding — cedar on the earlier homes, hardboard on the later ones — is now fifty-plus years into that beating.

Hardboard is the quiet problem on this hill. It looked like wood, priced below wood, and once its paint film cracks it drinks water like a sponge, swelling at the butt joints and nail heads. Cedar fares better but still cups and splits where sun and rain alternate. If your walls show wavy lines in the afternoon light, the substrate is telling you something.

What a Proper Re-Side Involves

Tearing off old siding is the only chance anyone gets to see the sheathing, and on Alabama Hill we regularly uncover rot at window corners and behind decks that the owners never suspected. Our process treats the wall as a system rather than a surface:

• Full removal of the existing cladding and inspection of every sheet of sheathing
• A modern weather-resistive barrier with taped seams, replacing brittle 60s-era building paper
• New flashing at every window head, deck ledger, and trim penetration
• Fiber cement or LP SmartSide installed to manufacturer spec so the finish warranty actually holds

Fiber cement has become the default recommendation here for a simple reason: it ignores the bay's wind-driven rain, holds paint two to three times longer than wood, and gives no purchase to the woodpeckers that work the older cedar walls near Whatcom Falls Park.

Keeping the Character of the Street

Alabama Hill's mid-century houses have clean, horizontal lines worth respecting. We match original lap reveals, rebuild wide fascia and corner boards to the era's proportions, and help owners pick colors that flatter low-slung rooflines instead of fighting them. A re-side should read as a restoration from the curb, not a renovation billboard.

The Company Behind the Work

Alpine Exteriors has re-clad Bellingham homes for 25 years, and the crew that measures your walls is the crew that builds them — more than 2,000 projects across Whatcom County without handing work to brokers. We back installations with a 25-year workmanship warranty that covers the labor itself, which matters more than any brochure once winter storms start testing the flashing.

Free on-site estimates are part of how we work: we walk the whole exterior, probe the suspect areas, and give you numbers for the honest scope rather than a teaser figure that grows later. If your hillside home is due, let's look at it together before another wet season soaks in.