Every second call we get about siding replacement in Vancouver includes the same question, usually near the end, almost as an afterthought: "Can you just go over what's there?" The owner has seen a lower number from someone who plans to do exactly that. Strap the old wall, hang new planks, done in half the time. The number looks good. The question is what that number buys, and on most houses built before about 2005 in the Lower Mainland, it buys a new skin over a wall nobody has looked inside.
This is a comparison of the two approaches, full tear-off and overclad, with 2026 installed costs, the code position in BC, and a direct recommendation at the end. We do both. We do far more of one than the other, and the reasons are below.
Is it better to tear off old siding or side over it in Vancouver?
Tear off. For roughly nine out of ten siding replacement projects in Vancouver, full removal is the right call, because the coastal climate rots sheathing from the inside and you cannot see that damage through the old cladding. Overclad costs 10 to 15 percent less up front, but it skips the sheathing inspection, complicates window flashing, and usually cannot deliver the 10 mm drained cavity the BC Building Code expects on this coast. Overclad only makes sense on a wall with a documented, dry, post-2005 rainscreen assembly.
What each option actually involves
The two words get used loosely, so here is what we mean on site.
A full tear-off strips the wall to the sheathing. Old siding, old building paper or housewrap, old trim, old flashings, all of it goes into the bin. The crew then inspects every square foot of plywood or OSB, replaces what has gone soft, installs a new water-resistive barrier, new window and door flashings tied into that barrier, rainscreen strapping, and finally the new cladding. On a typical 2,400 square foot Vancouver Special, that is a three to five week job with scaffolding on all four sides.
An overclad leaves the existing cladding in place. The crew fastens vertical strapping through the old siding into the studs, sometimes adds a new housewrap over the old cladding first, extends the window and door jambs outward to meet the new wall plane, and hangs the new siding on the strapping. No bin full of old material, no sheathing inspection, and a schedule about 30 to 40 percent shorter.
There is a third thing people call overclad that is not really overclad. On some houses we remove the siding but leave sound sheathing and a sound, recent housewrap in place, then re-flash and re-clad. That is a tear-off with less demolition. It is the best case, and it only exists when the wall underneath was built right the first time.
2026 installed pricing in Metro Vancouver
Numbers below are what we are seeing on signed contracts in Greater Vancouver this year, per square foot of wall area, with fiber cement lap siding as the finish. Vinyl runs lower, longboard and cedar run higher, but the tear-off versus overclad gap behaves the same way across finishes.
Full tear-off with fiber cement lands between $17 and $24 per square foot installed. That includes removal and disposal, a new water-resistive barrier, strapping, flashings, trim, and the siding itself. Removal and disposal is roughly $2.50 to $4.00 of that. Sheathing repair is extra and is the number nobody can give you in advance: replacing a sheet of rotted plywood and the wet insulation behind it runs $180 to $350 per sheet, and rot in the framing behind it runs $400 to $900 per stud bay once you factor in the structural sistering and the inspection.
Overclad with the same fiber cement lands between $14 and $20 per square foot. The strapping is a little heavier because it has to reach studs through the old cladding, and jamb extensions on every window and door add $250 to $600 per opening depending on the trim detail. There is no disposal cost and no sheathing repair line, because nobody looks at the sheathing.
So the up-front saving on a 2,400 square foot house is somewhere between $6,000 and $10,000. Real money. Now look at what it is buying.
Why the wall underneath matters more than the wall on top
Vancouver gets about 1,150 mm of rain a year at the airport and closer to 1,500 mm on the North Shore. It arrives sideways for five months. Cladding installed between roughly 1980 and 2005 in this region was often put directly on the sheathing with building paper and no drainage cavity, and on stucco-on-foam assemblies, no drainage at all. That is the leaky condo era, and it did not only affect condos.
We open walls on houses in Burnaby, East Vancouver, Coquitlam and Surrey every month. On pre-2000 face-sealed walls, we find sheathing damage that needs repair on well over half of them. Usually it is at the bottom of window openings, at deck ledgers, at the base of the wall where the siding sat too close to grade, and at the inside corners where two roofs dump into one valley. The owner did not know. The siding looked fine from the driveway. The plywood behind it was the colour of coffee.
An overclad seals that plywood in for another 30 years, and adds a second layer that slows down drying. If the original wall was wet, it stays wet, and now the framing is next.
That is the whole argument. The rest is detail.
The rainscreen question
The BC Building Code, in Section 9.27, requires a drained and vented air space of at least 10 mm behind cladding in locations with a moisture index above 0.90. Every municipality in Metro Vancouver is in that zone. This is what people mean by rainscreen: a capillary break that lets water that gets behind the siding drain out and dry.
Overclad can technically create a cavity, because the strapping holds the new siding off the old. The problem is what the cavity drains onto and how it vents. On a true rainscreen wall the cavity sits between the cladding and a continuous water-resistive barrier with flashings lapped into it, so water that hits the barrier runs down and out at the base flashing. On an overclad, the cavity sits on top of the old siding. Water runs down over vinyl or old cedar, hits the old window head flashing that was never designed to be buried, and finds the gap.
Some contractors wrap the old siding with new housewrap before strapping. It helps. It also creates a wall with two water-resistive barriers and old flashings trapped between them, and integrating the new window flashings with the new barrier means either removing the windows or relying on tape at the jamb extension. Tape on a jamb extension is where a lot of overclad walls leak in year four.
If you want to read the wider history of how BC arrived at these rules, our piece on rainscreen retrofit and the leaky condo legacy covers it.
Windows and doors are where overclad gets expensive
An overclad pushes the face of the wall out by the thickness of the old siding plus the strapping, typically 35 to 50 mm. Every window and door now sits in a recess. The fix is a jamb extension: new trim boxes built out to the new plane, with a sill and a head flashing that has to shed water past the old one.
On a house with 18 openings, that is 18 places where a carpenter is building a small box around a window and hoping the flashing behind it works. Multiply that by 30 winters. We have re-done enough of these to have an opinion.
On a full tear-off the windows are either left in place with new flashings lapped correctly into the new barrier, or replaced at the same time. Replacing windows during a re-clad is the most cost-efficient moment to do it, because the wall is already open and the scaffold is already up. Our article on window and door flashing details in BC wall assemblies walks through the sequence.
Permits and what the municipality will ask
Most Metro Vancouver municipalities require a building permit when the exterior cladding assembly changes, and the City of Vancouver, Burnaby and North Vancouver all treat a re-clad as an envelope alteration rather than a cosmetic repair. The permit reviewer will ask how the wall meets 9.27, which means they want to see the rainscreen cavity, the barrier and the flashing details on paper.
Overclad drawings get more questions. Not because it is banned, it is not, but because the reviewer has the same concern we do: what is behind the new layer and how does it dry. On multi-family and strata buildings the municipality will usually want a building envelope professional to sign off, and in our experience very few envelope engineers in BC will put their stamp on an overclad over a pre-2005 face-sealed wall. If your building is a strata, plan for a tear-off from the start. The building envelope work on those projects is engineered, sequenced and inspected in ways an overclad cannot be.
Weight, fasteners and fire
Three smaller points that come up during design.
Weight is rarely a problem on a wood-frame house. Fiber cement is heavier than vinyl, about 2.3 pounds per square foot for lap siding, and the studs do not care. It matters on strapping fastener choice: on an overclad the screws pass through 12 to 20 mm of old material before reaching the stud, so we specify longer structural screws, not nails, and we hit every stud. Missed studs are common on overclads because the old siding hides the framing layout. A stud finder does not work through vinyl over foam.
Fasteners also raise a durability point. Every screw through old cladding is a hole through whatever water barrier the old wall had. Hundreds of them.
Fire matters at the property line. Vancouver's zoning on narrow lots puts many side walls within 1.2 m of the neighbour, and the code limits unprotected openings and cladding combustibility on those exposures. Adding a second combustible layer, say new cedar over old cedar, can change the assembly's rating and needs to be checked. Fiber cement over vinyl is usually fine. Cedar over cedar on a 1.2 m setback is a question for the permit desk.
The narrow case where overclad is defensible
There is one. A house built after about 2005, with a rainscreen wall that was inspected during construction, with no history of leaks, and cladding that is failing for cosmetic or material reasons rather than moisture reasons. Faded or brittle vinyl from a 2008 build on a wall that has always been dry, for instance.
Even then, we would usually strip the vinyl. It comes off in a day and the disposal costs little, which means the "overclad" saving is mostly gone and you get a look at the barrier for free. What you keep is the existing housewrap and flashings, if they pass inspection. That is the partial tear-off described earlier, and it is a good outcome.
The true overclad, where the old cladding stays, makes sense on that same post-2005 wall when the old cladding is something awkward to remove, like a bonded panel, and you have verified the wall is dry with inspection openings. We have done it. Twice in the last three years, out of well over a hundred re-clads.
How to verify before you decide
You do not have to guess. Before we price a siding replacement in Vancouver, we do three things, and any contractor bidding your job should be willing to do the same.
Cut inspection openings. Four to six of them, 300 mm square, at the highest-risk locations: below a window sill on the weather side, at a deck ledger, at the base of the wall near grade, and at an inside corner. Photograph the sheathing, probe it with an awl, and put it back with a patch flashed properly. Cost is a few hundred dollars and it tells you whether overclad is even on the table.
Run a moisture meter on the interior side of the exterior walls, at the base, below windows. Readings above 19 percent on the drywall side mean the sheathing is worse.
Check the permit history. Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey all let you pull past permits. If the house had an envelope permit after 2005, the wall may be a rainscreen assembly. If it did not, assume it is not.
On a 1990s house in Kitsilano last spring, the owner wanted an overclad to save about $8,000. The inspection openings found soft sheathing at three of five locations. The tear-off found 14 sheets of plywood and two rotten sill plates. The repair came to about $11,000 on top of the re-clad. Had the wall been overclad, that rot would have kept going into the floor framing and the fix in ten years would have been a five-figure structural job with the new siding coming off again.
Choosing the new cladding while you are at it
The tear-off decision and the material decision are separate, but they get made together. Fiber cement lap is the default for most Vancouver residential re-clads because it handles the wet, holds paint for 15 years, and is not a fire concern at the property line. Our comparison of Hardie board, stucco and vinyl for BC goes deeper on the trade-offs. Longboard and cedar cost more and look better on the right house. Stucco is a different trade and a different article.
Whatever you choose, the wall behind it is the same: barrier, flashings, 10 mm cavity, cladding. Get that sequence right and any of the finishes will last 30 years. Get it wrong and none of them will. This is the part of a siding replacement project we spend the most time on, and the part the overclad quote skips.
Timeline expectations
A full tear-off and re-clad on a detached Vancouver house runs three to five weeks on site, plus permit time, which is currently four to ten weeks in the City of Vancouver and two to six in most suburbs. Add a week if windows are being replaced. Weather matters: we do tear-offs from late spring through fall and avoid opening large wall areas in the atmospheric river months unless the house is fully scaffolded and tarped.
An overclad runs two to three weeks on site. That is the honest schedule advantage, and for an owner who cannot live through a longer project it is real. It is also the only advantage that survives contact with an inspection opening.
Direct recommendation
Tear it off.
If your house or building was clad before 2005 and you do not have paperwork proving a rainscreen wall, do not overclad. Not to save $8,000, not to save three weeks. The money you save is the money you would have spent finding and fixing the rot, and the rot does not stop because you covered it.
If the wall is a verified post-2005 rainscreen assembly with no moisture history, strip the old cladding anyway, inspect the barrier, and keep what passes. You get most of the overclad saving and none of the risk.
Reserve the true overclad for the rare dry wall with cladding that is impractical to remove, and only after inspection openings confirm the sheathing.
MV Construction has been doing exterior renovations across Greater Vancouver and Vancouver Island for more than ten years. We are fully licensed, WCB-insured, and our workmanship is warranty-backed. Every siding replacement we price starts with inspection openings, and every estimate is written and fixed-scope, with sheathing repair priced per sheet so there are no surprises when the wall comes off. If you are weighing tear-off against overclad on your own exterior renovation, call (778) 375-5672 or request a written estimate and we will start with the wall, not the siding.
FAQ
Can you put new siding over old siding in BC?
It is not prohibited, but it is rarely a good idea on the coast. The BC Building Code requires a drained 10 mm cavity behind cladding in Metro Vancouver's moisture zone, and an overclad has to create that cavity on top of old cladding and old flashings that were never designed to be buried. Municipalities will permit it with drawings, but most envelope engineers will not sign off on an overclad over a pre-2005 face-sealed wall.
How much does siding replacement cost in Vancouver in 2026?
Full tear-off with fiber cement lap siding runs $17 to $24 per square foot of wall installed in Greater Vancouver this year, including removal, new barrier, strapping, flashings and trim. Sheathing repair is extra, typically $180 to $350 per sheet. A 2,400 square foot detached house usually lands between $45,000 and $65,000 all in, before windows.
How much cheaper is overclad than tear-off?
About 10 to 15 percent on the cladding contract, or $6,000 to $10,000 on a typical detached house. Jamb extensions on windows and doors eat some of that saving, at $250 to $600 per opening. The saving disappears entirely if the wall underneath has rot that later has to be repaired through the new siding.
How do I know if there is rot behind my siding?
Inspection openings. Cut four to six 300 mm squares at high-risk spots, usually below window sills on the weather side, at deck ledgers, at the base of the wall and at inside corners, and probe the sheathing. Interior moisture readings above 19 percent at the base of exterior walls are a second warning sign. A contractor who prices a siding replacement without opening the wall is guessing.
Do I need a permit to replace siding in Vancouver?
In the City of Vancouver, Burnaby, North Vancouver and most Metro Vancouver municipalities, yes, because a re-clad is an envelope alteration. The reviewer will want to see how the new wall meets Section 9.27 of the BC Building Code, meaning the rainscreen cavity, barrier and flashing details. Strata and multi-family buildings usually also need a building envelope professional's sign-off.
