Sehome is old Bellingham, and it looks the part: steep streets climbing from downtown toward the Sehome Hill Arboretum, lined with Victorians, foursquares, and craftsman houses that date from the 1890s through the 1920s. Siding work in this neighborhood is closer to restoration than production remodeling. Get it wrong and a hundred-year-old house loses its face; get it right and the house looks the way it did when the trolley still ran, only tighter and drier than it has been in decades.
Century-Old Walls, Modern Water Management
Most Sehome homes were sided with old-growth cedar bevel or drop siding, nailed over plank sheathing with no building paper worth mentioning. That old-growth wood is remarkably durable, which is why so much of it survives, but a century of Bellingham rain finds every failure: punky boards behind downspouts, rot at window heads where flashing never existed, and paint that will not hold on chronically damp north walls shaded by the arboretum's firs. Homes converted to student rentals near Western Washington University add deferred maintenance to the list.
Our approach is surgical where it can be and complete where it must be. Sometimes that means replacing forty boards and re-flashing every opening; sometimes it means a full re-side that reproduces the original profiles, corner boards, and water table details so the streetscape keeps its character.