When the Contract Stops at “New Siding,” So Does the Work
Ever look at a bid and wonder whether that number covers your whole house or just the part you can see from the street?
Or worry you will find out what was left out two months after the crew packs up?
In this post, you will learn what your contract should spell out before you sign, which scope items belong on the page, how house wrap, soffit, and fascia should appear, what your deposit, payment schedule, and warranty terms need to say, and how to hold any Ann Arbor area bid up against the same checklist.
What Should an Exterior Remodel Contract Include?
An exterior remodel contract should include a line-item scope of work, a written completion standard covering caulking, flashing, and sealing, a deposit and payment schedule tied to named milestones, warranty terms in plain English, and a clear statement on whether the timeline is guaranteed.
Anything left off the page is not part of the job you are buying.
What an Exterior Remodel Contract Should Spell Out Before You Sign
Five things belong on the page before your name goes on it.
- The scope of work is broken into line items, with numbers next to them, rather than a single broad paragraph.
- A completion standard. Ours states that everything is caulked, flashed, and sealed to industry best-practice standards.
- What is included and what is not included are both written down.
- The payment schedule is tied to named milestones.
- A straight answer on the timeline. Ours says we are not guaranteeing one.
At Peak Home Exteriors, our dates move.
Weather pushes them and change order delays push them, and we tell homeowners in person before anybody signs that our agreement does not guarantee how long siding a house takes.
Hunt for the line about what is not included.
A contract can be broadly written and still be completely signable, and some agreements are default forms where one typed sentence is the entire scope.
We are not going to guess at what other agreements around Saline say.
We can tell you that a homeowner reading a vague one could close it, thinking this just says we are replacing all the siding, so we are good to go.
The Scope Items That Belong in Writing, From Tear-Off to Final Cleanup
Here is the run of work a full exterior remodel contains, in the order it happens.
- Tear-off and removal of the old siding.
- Inspection of the sheathing once the wall is open.
- Weather barrier, meaning house wrap, over the sheathing.
- The new siding is named by product rather than described as siding.
- Trim, where a trim package is part of the job.
- Soffit and fascia.
- Caulking, flashing, and sealing at every transition.
- Cleanup and a final walkthrough.
The sheathing inspection needs its own line because nobody can see the sheathing while the old siding is still on, and soft or rotten decking turns up on tear-off day rather than on the estimate visit.
Flashing and trim show up in dozens of spots on a single house: windows, doors, corners, the roof-to-wall transitions, anywhere two materials meet.
Listing everyone would run for pages, so ours closes the scope of work with a single sentence instead: everything will be caulked, flashed, and sealed to industry-best-practice standards.
That line says the job gets finished, not that we slapped on siding because siding was typed above it.
We have opened up walls where the vapor barrier behind the old siding was never installed.
Siding run too tight to the roof line with no clearance, rotting from the bottom edge up.
The homeowner saw a finished wall and had no reason to think otherwise.
Why Soffit, Fascia, and House Wrap Belong in the Base Scope, Not as Add-Ons
These two belong on the page differently, and the difference matters before you compare bids.
House wrap is included in every siding scope we quote, for every home size, and across both material tiers.
It is the water-resistant layer between your sheathing and your siding; the siding sheds most of the water, while the wrap handles what gets past it.
Skip it, and you get the walls we described above.
Soffit and fascia are different, and here we would push back on the way the question is usually framed.
It is in the base price in most scenarios, but it is not automatic on every project, and it is written as its own line item, so you can see whether it is in or out on your job.
Some homeowners do not want to pay for it, and some do not need to, so we lay it out rather than quietly fold it in.
Most do want it, in our experience.
When you are spending $28,000 to $35,000 to reskin a 1,500-square-foot home, leaving the old soffit up does most of the point.
The goal is usually maintenance-free and cohesive, not painting again in two years.
You buy a whole new car, paint half of it, and still, half of it looks old.
Added later as its own job, soffit and fascia runs $6,000 to $7,000 on a 1,500 square foot home and $14,000 to $20,000 at 3,500 square feet and up.
What the Deposit, Payment Schedule, and Warranty Terms Should Say
That is the whole standard, and the payment schedule is the part we would read most closely as homeowners, because it tells you exactly when money leaves your account.
Ours reads in three points, each tied to something that happens.
- $500 at the discovery call, which pays for the on-site consultation and gets applied to the total price of your project.
- 50% at contract signing, which holds your start date on the calendar.
- The balance on the final day, after the walkthrough.
That last one is worth reading twice on any contract you are handed.
Ours says that on the final day, we walk the house together, run a checklist, and sign off before we collect anything.
We do it in that order, so nothing turns up two weeks later that you noticed and we did not.
Warranty terms should answer two questions: who covers the product, and who covers the installation.
The manufacturer covers the material, whether that is CertainTeed Monogram, James Hardie fiber cement, or LP engineered wood.
Our limited lifetime craftsmanship warranty covers the install, and if something happens to your project that falls within our contract and is under our control, we come out and fix it at no cost.
How Peak Puts the Full Scope in the Contract Instead of Saving It for the Site Visit
The scope language and the numbers are in place before we ever pull into your driveway.
Our pricing is published by home size and material, so a 2,500 to 3,200 square foot home in vinyl reads $47,000 to $69,000 and the same house in James Hardie or LP engineered wood reads $74,000 to $97,000.
On the discovery call, 90 to 100% of the time, we have a ballpark written down before we pick up the phone.
The scope language, including the caulked, flashed, and sealed line, is standard in our proposals rather than written fresh per visit, and every proposal we hand a homeowner in Chelsea or Ypsilanti carries it.
What the site visit adds is measurements and material selections.
Not your first look at what is included.
Before anything starts, we go through the contract together and answer questions until you are comfortable, and only then do we sign and set your start date.
Our scope is decently detailed: line items with numbers next to them, plus that closing sentence covering finishing work across the whole house.
A default agreement can be shorter than ours and still be perfectly legal.
Short and signable is not the same as complete.
How to Compare Any Contractor’s Contract Against This Checklist
Read the scope of work instead of the price, and ask six questions about it.
- Does it name house wrap, or jump straight from tear-off to siding?
- Does it say anything about caulking, flashing, and sealing, or does the scope stop once the siding is on?
- Is the soffit and fascia its own line, and does it say in or out?
- Is every payment tied to a named milestone?
- Does it say what happens on the final day, before the last check?
- Does it tell you the truth about the timeline, or promise you a finish date?
We will not tell you what the contractor across town puts in his contract because we do not read other companies’ contracts and would be guessing.
We will say that the finishing line is the one most likely to be missing, and it is the line that decides whether you get a complete job or a covered wall.
Two bids can differ widely in price and describe two different amounts of work.
If a scope reads vague, ask for the details in writing.
A verbal yes, we do all that is not in your contract.
Your Contract Should Say More Than “New Siding.” At Peak Home Exteriors, Ours Does.
The one thing to take with you is simple: read the scope of work, and check whether it names house wrap, flashing, and sealing, or stops at the siding.
If those lines are missing from the page, they are missing from the job. When you want a scope you can actually read, fill out our contact form or give us a call today.
