A young homeowner over near St. George stopped me on the sidewalk this spring, pointing up at her brick front with real worry in her face. There was a white, chalky bloom creeping across the lower courses, and she was sure the wall was rotting from the inside out. My name’s Tony Russo — I’ve spent close to 20 years repointing and repairing brick around Staten Island and the rest of the five boroughs, and I’ve been reading brick faces since I was an apprentice. I could tell her before I’d finished my coffee: that’s efflorescence, and nine times out of ten it’s the brick telling you a water story,…

Two of my Austin rentals sit less than a mile apart, and I resided both the same year with two different products. The one I clad in cheap vinyl to save money now has panels that have gone chalky and warped on the west wall where the afternoon sun hammers it. The other, in fiber cement, still looks like the day the crew left. That $4,000 difference in upfront cost has cost me far more in the vinyl unit’s repaint-and-replace cycle since. My name’s Dale Kowalski, and I’ve spent 19 years re-siding houses and small rental properties around Austin, Texas — everything from 1930s bungalows in Hyde Park to postwar…

There’s a house going up right now on a new street in Cedar Park, just north of Austin, with limestone veneer running the whole front, brick wrapping the two flanking columns, and lap siding filling the gables. On paper that reads like a materials mess. In person it works, because whoever designed it followed a couple of rules that most mixed-material facades ignore. I’m a residential designer who’s spent enough years drawing elevations around Cedar Park, Round Rock, and the rest of the Austin area to see the same mismatch happen over and over, and this is the question I field more than any other: can you combine stone, brick,…

Press your thumb into the corner trim under a window and feel it give like a stale sponge — that’s the tell I look for on nearly every wood-framed house I walk through, no matter how good the paint job looks from the curb. I found exactly that on a 1920s colonial in Westville last month: freshly painted, nice curb appeal, and trim that was mush underneath the finish. My name’s Tom Reilly, I’ve spent better than 20 years doing exterior carpentry and rot repair on old houses around New Haven, and water-damaged siding and trim is still the single most common defect I write up on an inspection. Here’s…

Whether to paint or replace a house’s siding isn’t really a style call — it’s a structural diagnosis, and the paint is usually just the symptom you happen to notice first. That’s the question a reader in Great Kills, Staten Island sent me last spring with a photo: a modest split-level with cedar clapboard, the south wall chalky and faded, a few boards near the bottom cupping away from the wall, and one line underneath it — “Paint or replace?” I’ve gotten some version of that question dozens of times, and getting the answer right usually saves a homeowner thousands of dollars in one direction or the other. To reason…

My name is Tom Riordan, and I’ve spent the last twenty years renovating older houses around New Haven, Connecticut — Hamden, East Rock, Westville, all of it. When the cedar clapboards on my own Hamden house finally rotted past patching, I spent three weekends standing in the driveway staring at bare sheathing, torn between brick veneer and fiber cement siding. I got quotes for both, drove around East Rock and Westville looking at houses that had already made each choice, and landed on an answer I still stand behind. Here’s the comparison I wish someone had handed me before I started, because the glossy brochures for both products skip the…