As a siding installer: Over the siding
As a homeowner: siding butted to the corner
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I was wondering if people only do that around here, putting the corner board over the siding, or if people do that everywhere. It kind of sounds like it's mostly around here people do it.
The job I'm working on is a lawsuit job where the builder didn't put on any house wrap under the siding. So we are tearing off the old siding, re-sheeting and re-siding it. The window trim was done the same way, with the trim over the siding.
We are using Hardiplank siding and we're only redoing 3/4 of the house, we are leaving the front the way it is. For some reason they decided to put on house wrap in the front but not the rest of the house. So we are going to leave the corner board that they did the way it is, with it nailed over the siding. But we'll do the rest of the house with all the window trim and corner board nailed to the sheathing first. We're doing it that way because the way the windows are arranged, we will save about 200 little pieces of siding by nailing the trim right to the building.
Basically we were worried about the gaps it leaves when you run the corner board over the lap siding. When we tore everything off, we found they didn't put any caulking or anything behind the corner boards. So there is nothing but air between each gap and the building. I don't see what's to stop water from getting in those gaps and into the building. If you were using plywood, T1-11 siding, then I can see doing it that way because you wouldn't have any gaps. But with any kind of lap siding you have a half inch gap on every course.
We asked the inspector which way he prefers it. He said personally he likes to have the corner board nailed to the building with the siding butted up to it. But he said he can't enforce that because it's legal to have trim on the outside of your siding.
I have never heard of water damage caused by nailing corner board to the outside of siding, so maybe it's o.k, I don't know. But I still wonder why most builders do it that way. Some people claim it saves time, but it seems to me I can put on siding just as fast by butting it to the trim as I can by nailing the trim over the siding. And in some cases you can save time nailing trim right to the building, such as when you have two windows close together, then you can omit the siding between it.
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