Will painting my vinyl siding increase the value of my home?

Many people ask me if painting my vinyl siding increases the value of my home. It MAY increase the short term value of your home to an unsuspecting buyer PROVIDED you had the vinyl siding painted IMMEDIATELY before you put your home on the market. However, you have irreversibly damaged the vinyl siding, entirely voided the warranty, and are on the flight path of near-future events that will cause you money and regret!

The biggest problems with painting vinyl siding.

The biggest problem with painting your vinyl siding rests with the sidings expansion and retraction through ambient and direct temperature fluctuations. In fact, your vinyl siding, while you may not actually see it, is constantly moving as it reacts to the days high and low temperature. Vinyl siding absorbs heat, and it is designed to move to compensate for the expansions and retractions throughout the day to keep your siding from buckling and warping and keeping the profile intact.

When you paint your vinyl siding, you actually change the rate at which your siding absorbs and dissipates the heat. You also are causing a chicklet effect as the courses slide back and forth over each other. This exposes the unpainted portions of the laps. And that is the least of the undesirable negative effects that arise from painting your vinyl siding.

In most cases, when a homeowner is considering painting their siding, it is because the colors are old, faded, or outdated. This old siding is quite thin in comparison to today’s extrusions. As we mentioned above, the added layer of paint you’ve added pulls and holds additional heat in the vinyl siding. This causes warping, buckling, and in some cases, literally mutates the profile of the vinyl siding resulting in impossible to ignore unsightly damage. Additionally, this severely reduces the siding panels wind shear resistance.

Painting darker colors over, even the new siding extrusions, will absolutely cause the siding to mutate. You will then be faced with additional replacement costs ON TOP of the expense incurred from the initial painting mistake.

Another aspect to consider before painting your vinyl siding is the fact paint won’t fix cracked, chipped, or broken pieces. So, even if you go ahead and paint your siding, those pieces need to be replaced before the paint job.

A final point to take note of is: MOST vinyl siding manufactured in the last 2o yrs has a lifetime, non-prorated, transferable warranty, meaning that when you sell your home, the new owners are also afforded warranty coverage. But the very second you start applying a coat of paint to that siding, that lifetime warranty is VOID.

So, when someone asks me if painting their vinyl siding will increase the value of their home, I quite quickly, honestly, and with absolute certainty answer, “No, painting your vinyl siding will actually DECREASE the value of your home, void your warranty, and in most cases will ensure you have to replace your painted siding with new vinyl siding due to irreversible and unsightly damage. A professional vinyl siding repair is much better.