This is the you ask the pros answer podcast. Do you have questions about an

upcoming exterior contracting project? We've got answers. Welcome to the you ask the

pros answer podcast. Hey, welcome to the you ask the pros answer podcast.

Your questions answered by the pros you trust presented by pro exteriors. Today we

are kicking off our project profile series. We've done this a little bit in the

past where we're going to take a look at one of our past projects and we're going

to discuss what went into it. It hopes that you as a homeowner will glean some

tips and tricks and good information for you to take forward with you.

Today, though, we are going to be going behind the scenes of our top performing

YouTube video titled Sighting secrets, fixing hardy siding issues.

I am here today with the owner of Pro Exteriors, Aaron Rodgers. Aaron, how are you?

I'm wonderful, Cole. How are you? I'm pretty good. My kiddos start back to school

tomorrow, which is hard to believe. Your boys are homeschooled, right? When do they

plan to jump back into things? We're letting them kind of have a slow start. I

know the older boys girlfriends. They started back this week So yeah,

it's weird to think kids going back in the like the middle of August the beginning

of August. It's just odd Yeah, I don't know what it was like for you here in

Sussex County when you're growing up, but in Baltimore It was after Labor Day. Yeah.

Yep, and that just felt Right now. So my kids go back tomorrow on a Friday and

then they have two days off for the weekend. So it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.

So yeah, the summer is gone really quickly. Always does, doesn't it?

Yes, it does. Okay. So you were on site for this repair job.

Correct? Yes. So the plan is we're going to actually take a look at this video

together and then we'll kind of deconstruct it together. So before we get to talking

too much, because I know with both of us on mic, we could, I don't know,

what is it, fall into? Ramble? Ramble. Yeah, make lots of talkie with our mouth.

So let's go ahead, let's take a look at this video. Like I was telling you off,

Mike, if you want to comment on your commentary. We'll pretend like this is back in

the day when there were DVDs and you could watch the special features and there was

commentary on stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So without further ado, let's go ahead and check

this out together. Siding failure explained. Good morning, everybody. We are in

Selbyville over in the base side community. Josh and I are here to start a little

partial siding replacement job. Got a house built roughly 10 years ago.

I've got James Hardy siding. I've had some failures in the siding over the years,

as well as some interior issues. So I'm gonna show you what we're dealing with and

ultimately what the issues are. So here we are. I've torn off a little section here

to kind of get a closer view of everything. Number one issue we deal with with

Hardy siding is nailing. We deal with this a lot with vinyl siding as well.

off -siding essentially has to be nailed into the studs. So the issues that we deal

with a lot with Hardy is when it's not nailed into the studs, you get vibration in

your siding. You get siding that essentially falls out of alignment. It kind of

slips down over time as the wind vibrates and it kind of pulls it away. So I

pulled a couple of pieces off here and I've kind of pulled back the house wrap to

kind of figure out exactly what we have going on here. It looks like this nail is

in the stud. - The camera work. And then if we come over here, our next stud is

roughly right here. So we know that there should be a nail right here and there's

not. This nail is not in a stud. This nail is not in a stud. Our next stud is

over here. So we know that this nail is not into a stud. This nail is not into a

stud. This one's not into a stud. These two up here are not into a stud. Normally

when you're doing hardy siding, if you're nailing everything into the studs, your

butt joints are in the siding. So this joint here and this joint here should be

either 16 inch or 24 inches on center depending on how your wall is framed. This

one's on 25 inch center, this one here is 24 inch center, this one's 25 inch

center, this one's 26 inch center. So we know right away that there was no real

rhyme or reason how they were putting the siding up. All of these joints

realistically would be some category of 16 is on center. So it'd be 16,

32, 48, so on and so forth. So if you look down the wall, the whole wall is

going to be like that. If we were to go through here and put a tape measure on

every single one of these butt joints, we know for a fact that none of these are

going to be where they're supposed to be. I'm going to guess that randomly the

nails that made it into the stud were probably not on purpose. Definitely none of

the butt joints were done right. So we're going to get all this patched back

together. We're going to put the new hardy siding back up. All of our nails will

be at the studs, obviously. They use standard 15 -weight tarpaper for all their butt

flashings. We don't use tarpaper for this. We actually use an ice and water shield.

It's a little bit thicker. It doesn't break down. It doesn't deteriorate long -term.

You'll notice this piece right here, because hardy joints, we don't caulk these

joints. So what happens is over time, the UV rays get into it and actually

deteriorate the tarpaper in this little section here. So long term, probably not in

the first 10 years, but in the first, say, 15 years to 20 years, that will

actually just separate. It'll completely break apart and then you'll have no butt

flashing glass. Again, when you're using a product that's a 50 -year product, we want

to make sure that we're using all the flashings and everything that's associated with

it that are going to last just as long as the siding is.

All right, yeah. So, yeah. I realize there's some words that I say a lot more than

others. Yeah. So that's the danger of ever showing someone a video of themselves.

Yep. As the guy who edits this podcast weekly, trust me, I, I feel all of it on

me. Not, I'm not looking at you like, what is he doing? The nice thing about the

one being the one that edits it though is I can decide how many times I take out

the ums and us that I say. All right. Let's walk through this project. What was

the call like from the homeowner? I don't know if you recall it or not, but why

wasn't you and Josh headed out there to begin with? So the exterior of the home

is, although it is owned by the homeowner, it is in a community.

It's an attached home. So it's a condo, some people would call it, or a townhouse

style home. this gentleman just happened to have the end unit. The condo was about

to have the exteriors painted.

So it's usually a good time to just have like the outside kind of buttoned up nice

and tight. So he called us out there because he had noticed kind of a handful of

issues with this siding. He wanted their professional to come and look at it. I

can't remember specifically, but I'm pretty sure that this customer actually found us

on the James Hardy website as one of their Um, so obviously he wanted an expert.

He wanted somebody that's very familiar with James Hardy to, uh, to come out and

take a peek at it. The day that this video was shot, was this your guys first

visit out to the house or was this now? So this was, this would have been after

we had met with a homeowner, after we had signed the contract. Uh, this would have

been the day of starting construction. This is the day we were basically,

you know, tearing off the old siding and starting the the reinstallation. So

Are you guys I assume that was Josh behind the camera? Correct. Right. So you guys

did a good job of explaining a lot within a three minute span But was there

anything else happening behind the scenes? That you guys weren't able to capture Um,

I know you mentioned there's some interior issues as well. Yeah, Yeah, there there

had just been some There has been some interior water damage Stuff that it's mostly

around like penetrations and stuff there. There was a couple of vents on the On the

side wall there that you can kind of see in the back of the of the video there

We didn't really kind of point those out specifically But we had some water

Infiltration around several of those vents and then we had some water infiltration

around a couple of the windows So There was only one spot, I believe it was below

one of the windows where the homeowner had some interior damage at one point. That

was previous to this siding project though. So it wasn't actively leaking or anything

at this time. Behind the scenes, what else was going on there?

We try to open things up. That video was kind of a random thing. Once we had

signed We had to you know tear the siding off that day anyway, so it was like

kind of a great time to just Rip it. I think that video actually started with me

going over and being like man these guys have it lucky This siding is gonna come

off so easily and I literally put like two fingers behind it and pulled on it and

like two pieces Fell out. I was like, oh my gosh, and I was like Josh. Let's make

a video real quick. So But yeah, I mean, that's the stuff we deal with all the

time, especially with like the production homes, whether it's the national production

builders or some of the kind of regional builders, we deal with a lot of that

stuff. You know, they pay a fairly low labor wage, they provide all the materials

so that the guys that are installing this stuff, it's hard for them to really care

because they're getting paid bottom of the barrel wages, essentially. So, yeah.

And unfortunately, when you buy houses like that, and I've talked ad nauseam about

the fact that we moved into a home a year, just a little over a year ago, and,

you know, I'm in marketing, you read a marketing spec sheet or features, and they

can still put James Hardy siding on there, whether it was installed correctly or

not, because that's the physical product that went on the house. Um, all right.

You, you explained pretty quickly. Like I said, you had to say a lot in short

amount of time. What were some of the shortcuts that the previous installer took?

And maybe they weren't even shortcuts. What were some of the mistakes that you

pointed out? Yeah. So mistakes would be, um, the largest mistake they had on the

whole project was, uh, improper nailing. Um, James Hardy is a very heavy siding,

so when you're installing it, you know, it's important for multiple reasons to nail

into the studs. Number one, well, first and foremost, the manufacturer requires it.

So pretty much every siding manufacturer, whether it's vinyl, fiber cement is all

going to give you, you know, a PDF, the install instructions. Every single one of

them is going to tell you that you need to nail into the studs. is every single

nail going to land into the stud? No, it's just, you know,

that's just how it works out. With vinyl siding, it's not quite as important for

every single one of the nails to hit in the studs, but it's still like a

manufacturer's requirement. With James Hardy, because it is so heavy,

you know, we nail into the stud specifically because we want something actually, you

know, structural for it to kind of hang off of. And then the other part of that

is if it doesn't nail into the stud, it doesn't necessarily cinch the siding 100 %

tight. And if it's not tight, then it has that little bit of chatter in it. Like

if you've ever walked up to James Hardy siding and you kind of tap it and it

chatters, you know, a lot of times that is, you know,

it allows wind to get underneath there. And It has this really, really slow

vibration and it can do two things. Number one, it can back the actual nail out.

If the nail is only into plywood, you know, say half inch plywood, uh, it can

actually back that nail out, um, or it can actually pull the nail through the James

Hardy siding and it's no longer really holding anything. Um, so we ran into both of

those situations on this house. Uh, I would say probably

10 % 15 % of the nails on the side of that house. It was about a thousand square

feet on the side Only about 10 15 % of the nails were actually into any sort of

structural members, whether it be the floor joist or the actual studs And you said

that was likely you said in the video. I think that Those might have been happy

accidents Yes, potentially. Yeah. Yes So,

like, you know, house wrap is a code -required thing. Most of the conventional house

wraps we have on the market right now have, like, little cheater tabs on them,

little cheater marks, you know, like Dupont, Tyvek, Typar, Blockit,

which is the one that we typically use. All of them have these little tick marks

on them. Like, with Tyvek and Typar, they're going to be every eight inches apart.

And if they're on there specifically, like if you don't realize it, those little

tick marks are on there to help you find the stud. If, if, you know, if it's a

16 inches on center house, then every two tick marks, there should be a stud. Where

it gives you a measuring point, like if you know that right here in between the

two tick marks is a stud, then you know that, you know, the middle two more

middles over is going to be the next stud or if it's 24 inches on center, again,

two over, you're good to go.

So it's, that's on there specifically to kind of help you with your siding

installation.

So there's little things like that that can help you to kind of cheat and to kind

of be a little safer about it. And this particular case, this house had two layers

of weather barrier on the outside. It had a Tyvek Or like kind of a standard house

wrap is the base layer and then it had that that like quarter -inch bubble wrap

that they sell as like a Like an extra energy saver But but I mean when you put

that stuff on there, there's no markings on it whatsoever There's no way to really

find the studs behind it other than basically tapping on the wall Like you're trying

to find a stud for hanging a picture on your drywall Yeah, or you sit there and

you bang a nail until you find a stud and then you try to, you know, measure

down. A lot of the houses that we work on, if we got the house wrap up, we'll

find a first stud, we'll measure our 16s over and, you know, we'll verify that all

those 16s stay kind of on target. And then we'll take a level line and we'll mark

the lines all the way up the wall so that as we're going up, we know where the

stud is every single time, you know, where the studs are or where the butt joint

should be. Yeah, that wasn't just wasn't the case on this house. Once the crew got

there and demoed the job, how much of it how much of that end part of the house

needed to be redone? Was it the whole the whole side? Okay. Yep.

Could you walk me through the installation process the the right way? Yeah.

Okay.

So, yeah, so once we take it off, we basically, we pull the old house wrap off

there. You have to have a proper house wrap behind James Hardy product. Standard

Tyvek is not a suitable, standard Tyvek Typar is not a suitable membrane. For behind

James Hardy, you need something that is surfactant resistant, which is why we use

the Kimberly Clark Block It product. You basically need to have an air gap back

there because the stuff is a flat back siding and it, you know, moisture that

builds up behind the siding can end up rotting that siding out over time. Whereas

vinyl has weep holes, right? So yeah, vinyl is a, is a, um, is a weather resistant

product. You know, it doesn't really matter if, um, you know, it's kind of got some

space behind it. It's not a solid product. It's not going to rot. Um, you know,

we, we deal with a lot of houses here, like older cedar houses, a lot of them

have rotted out over the years because Tyvek was, you know, nobody ever said

anything about having an air gap or, you know, any sort of rain screen behind those

siding. So it's pretty common to see those things rotted out. So you're going to go

through and you're basically going to make sure that your house wrap is nice and

tight. All your seams have to be, you know, taped per code. Everything needs to be

kind of buttoned up around all of your windows and penetrations, you want to make

sure everything's, you know, taped with appropriate flashing tapes, caulk any sort of

penetrations that have like pipes or wires or anything coming out of it for, you

know, for energy, for bugs, for insects, whatever. And then you're going to go

around and make sure like your flashings are tighter on your, on your, like a

horizontal trim. So top of windows, tops of doors, any sort of like horizontal

decorative trims that you have, you want to make sure you have Z flashings put on

those and then you're going to go through and you're going to start marking out

your studs You know your your first piece you have to cut a little a little

starter strip Some guys will use a piece of wood. We usually just cut the top of

a piece of the hearty. So it's the same product And we throw that at the bottom

now one one kind of thing that a lot of guys fail on And so when you cut five

or cement everything that you cut Has to be touched up with with matching paint. So

when you cut the end of a board and you have a raw hearty edge You have to You

have to prime that edge with with the matching paint and they saw the touch up

kids. They're like 30 40 folks. So So, yeah, so you'll you'll cut the bottom

starter strip You'll put that in and then you're just gonna find the first stud,

you know They come in 12 foot lengths find the first stud put that in in, get

your flashing behind every one of the butt joints, and then you're going to just

slowly but surely kind of go down the line, make sure you're nice and level, and

then you'll start to kind of slowly go up from there. There's a couple of really

easy tools that we use, these little like kind of lap tools that we kind of click

on the bottom of the existing siding to make sure that our reveal stays consistent.

And realistically, you should be using those for every single row. And then every

handful of rows, you're going to want to grab your level and just make sure

everything stand nice and plumbing and level, you know, an eighth of an inch, you

know, over a 10 foot wall is not really that big of a deal. But if you've got a

48 foot long wall, and, you know, you drop a 16th on this row and a 16th on the

next row and the next row, it'll add up really, really, really, really quick. So

yeah, so you're going to go through basically that whole wall, cut out around all

your penetrations. Again, with James Hardy, you have to leave kind of a caulk gap.

So anytime you're like budding up against something, you're going to leave like an

inch, any sort of horizontal things that the Hardy has to kind of go over tops of

doors, tops of windows, tops of trim, you're required to leave a quarter inch gap.

And that's specifically so like the water that gets in there doesn't kind of like

naturally wick up. Um, if you have less than a quarter of an inch, it'll just like

your house is constantly negative air pressure trying to suck things in. So, um, but

yeah, and then you pretty much go all the way up the wall like that. Again, the

number one thing that we deal with all the time and pretty much any product roofing

inside is going to be poor nailing. So nailing is your number one most important

thing. Um, and then depending on where your environment is, like you want to use a

stainless steel nail most of the time for Hardy. And then, yeah, and then when

you're all set and done with that, I mean, you go back and you basically caulk all

your areas like around your windows, around your doors, all your penetrations, you go

back and usually caulk it with like a color match caulk. So it'll end up being the

same color as deciding. And you said that you do not caulk in between sections of

the Hardy. You don't caulk the butt joints.

Yeah, that used to be the way they did it. But no, hardy hardy siding,

it's fiber cement. So it's a cementious product, but it still expands and contracts.

I have James Hardy on my personal house. You know, I installed it, you know, to

the letter of the James Hardy install instructions. And I still, you know, if I go

out there certain times a year, specifically in the wintertime, you know, I have

eight inch gaps Between a lot of my lab siding, it's normal for it to move. It's,

you know, every private pretty much has some version of expansion and contraction. So

Um, so yeah, so you want it to move? It's going to move naturally. Just let it do

its thing. It's meant to do it Just a couple quick follow -ups. So in the video

you mentioned that one of the mistakes the original installer made was the flashing

material used You remind me and the audience what It is that we use so we we

usually use ice and water shield. Um, we'll take full rolls of ice and water shield

and we'll cut them down to, uh, like eight inch wide strips, like maybe four inches

wide, eight inches tall, um, depending on the size of the, of the Hardy itself. Uh,

in that video in this particular house, they had used just a standard, like 15

weight tar paper. Um, tar paper is not really meant to be like kind of exposed to

UV rays long term. So as the hardy kind of expands and contracts, and it basically

has a gap in the board, like I was speaking about, the UV rays just end up kind

of eating right through that tarpaper. Yeah, it's just, it's just a, again,

anytime you're using a product that has a lifetime, like a 50 year lifespan,

essentially, you want to use products with that, that also have a similar lifespan.

You know, if you're going to do like a James Hardy siding, you don't really want

to do a wood trim. You know, if you're doing cedar shake or cedar lap, you know,

use cedar trim, you know, it should all technically last about the same, same

timeframe. Yeah, and whether the same. Yeah. And then the, yeah,

that's why you mentioned using stainless steel nails, right? You don't want the nails

to be the failure point of this lifetime, you have a product.

If you were, so we are a contractor that uses James Hardy, loves the product,

what is it about the product that has made it become such a household name?

I mean, one thing is, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful product when it's up on the

wall. The other thing is, it's a very strong product. You can search a bunch of

their YouTube videos and there's a bunch of videos online from guys that have been

at like trade shows and stuff. You know, you can hit it with a baseball, you can

hit it with a golf ball and it's not going to break. It's not going to be, it's

not going to dry rot like vinyl siding does. It's not going to oxidize like a lot

of vinyl siding does. You know, it's a great alternative for,

you know, years ago, most of our siding was going to be wood. And then, you know,

aluminum came through and did its thing, but again, it dents and rips and

everything. So it was a great alternative to have kind of a normal style wood sided

house, but with a product that isn't going to rot. It's insect resistant. It also

has a crazy, I think it's a class A fire Um, so there'll be some areas where if

like you want fire rating, you have to use a product similar to James Hardy Because

the stuff won't burn. Believe me. I tried

We threw a piece in a in a we had a very large bonfire one time when we first

bought our farmhouse um, and just for you know For giggles.

I was like, let's just see if I can get this thing to light and I threw maybe a

little 18 inch piece of hardy in there Yeah, Yeah, nothing. Yeah. Other than the

paint bubbling off of it, I don't even really think it smoked all that much. That's

pretty cool. So, it was neat. So, you're going to have a lot of areas specifically

like California, Hawaii, where wildfires are a little bit more prevalent. Where your

local code, not your international code, but your local code will require you to

have a product that has some sort of class A. And you'll see a lot of houses out

there that some sort of like five or some inside and they'll have concrete tile or

clay tile on the roof because it has to have Certain fire ratings, you know when

wildfire kind of carries embers over you don't want anything that can light on fire.

Yeah

From a warranty standpoint, so thinking through the eyes of a homeowner if How does

the warranty work for for Hardy products? Is it the installation? Will that? void

out the warranty, or is it just on the product itself? So it'll have two different

warranties. It'll have a product warranty itself. Basically, the warranty of the

product itself isn't going to fail. And then you'll have like a paint, a small

paint warranty, if it's a factory finished paint. The warranty is like most any

product, if if it was installed properly,

Then the actual product itself that warranty will pretty much always stay in place

if you go in there And you nail it however the heck you want to if you don't you

know do the proper flashings if you Don't caulk where you're supposed to caulk if

you don't prime your your cut pieces and things of that nature I mean no

manufacturers should have to stay behind that You know if you buy a car and instead

of putting oil in it You know you put in the, in the, uh, in the oil reservoir

than obviously the manufacturer doesn't know you crap. So, um, your house is kind of

the same thing. You know, there's a, there's a big push for, you know, maintenance

free products. Uh, there is no such thing as 100 % maintenance free for anything.

Um, you know, you can have the best product made with the craziest materials with

the best finish on it possible, but even like dust and salt is going to land on

it and it's going going to have like a long term effect if it's never cleaned.

So yeah, so everything comes with its own level of maintenance. But with Hardy, man,

it's like, you know, you power wash once a year to get the bird poo off. And

there's not really anything much more than that. Pay attention to your caulk. That's

usually where we see the the only real failures on a properly installed project is

caulk tends to fail.

If caulk fails, you know, pull out the old caulk, re caulk it. But if you use a

nice polyurethane caulk, you should only have to caulk every, I don't even know, 10,

15 years. So yeah. All right. Before we go,

I want to give you an opportunity to promote pro exteriors.

After all, this show is presented by pro exteriors. Okay. This episode's coming out

late August 2025. So if you're watching this in 2050, this might not apply.

But why would you suggest somebody that's watching or listening to this today, why

would you suggest that they consider replacing their siding by going with pro

exteriors right now? I mean, realistically, you know,

siding has a pretty good ROI. It's one of those things where, things where people

are staying in their homes, rates are still kind of crappy. So yeah, it's a perfect

time to call an expert like ourselves. We can basically transform the exterior of

your home, make it look like it's brand new. I can take your old home and make it

look like it was just built. I can take your dingy home that needs some love and

make it look like it's been loved forever.

Audience, talk amongst yourselves for a second. I need to feed Aaron. I'm also the

producer of this show and the host. I need to feed him some information. Aaron,

this would be a good time to mention the 20th anniversary bundle where we are

offering free gutter guards with the purchase of any free, any roofing or siding

replacement project. All right, audience, we are back. Aaron, why else would people

maybe want to consider if they've been on the fence about it? Why would now be the

right time for them to go ahead and pull the trigger on that new James hardy

siding project. Yeah. So we are, we are, uh, as a, as a kind of a promo for our

20th anniversary, we are running a promo right now to get free stainless steel,

micro mesh gutter guards, um, for any sort of replacement project. So any roof, any

siding project, uh, we'll go ahead and throw in free gutter guards. Um, for any of

you guys that have gotten up on a ladder and had to clean out your gutters once

or twice a year, it sucks. And this will take care of that. Yeah.

Until a drone has the ability to start cleaning out my gutters, I'm not doing it.

It is not doing it. Plus, you got a bad back. So that's not really going to, it's

not really good for you. Oh, yeah. You and I, I only think we've, we'll talk on

another episode. Maybe we'll have a Cole's bad back section because I've got some

updates to share with you.

All right. Well, this has been fun. Thanks for giving us a bit of a behind the

scenes look at this video that has taken the YouTube world by storm and shown it

in mercy. All right. Thanks, Aaron. Thank you. All right. That is all we have for

you today on the You Ask the Pros Answer podcast. Thank you to everybody who's been

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One of the two places, if you click here now, you can watch that video again and

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