Thinking About Maintenance? The Importance and Reason for Soffit and Fascia

by Brad Flannigan

Soffits and fascia are not only important aspects when it comes to your home’s appearance, they are also critical to its performance.  While they are a big part of what everyone first sees when looking at your home, soffit and fascia are not just cosmetic.  If they are not maintained, they will not only detract from the look and value of your home, they could cause extensive damage as well.

Here at Callen, we do a lot of aluminum soffits and fascia.  Why?  Because once you install aluminum soffits and fascia, you instantly add value to your home, as they are maintenance free, look great, and can add more design features to your home than wood.  Aluminum also offers more than 40 colors to better personalize your home.  Usually, we match the color to the window trim or gutters, but each homeowner has a unique approach and aluminum soffits and fascia provide many options.

The look is also unique in that it is a paneled soffit – it does not look smooth like plywood.  Therefore, it adds a cleaner, neater, cut to the home, with accurate mitered corners.  Just think, no more climbing on ladders, or neck and back pains, or scraping, priming, and painting.  In addition, you may need to repaint every few years.  Plus, if the wood rots, that needs to be replaced.  Additional costs can add up quickly.

Cleaning aluminum soffit and fascia is much easier as well.  Our unique aluminum soffits and fascia have a baked on enamel, hard coat, with a factory-machined finish.  A pressure washer will clean off most of the aluminum where there was an overlap of water, or trees and leaves have left marks.  With traditional paint, you don’t really have an easy cleaning option, and pressure washing will more than likely take the paint right off.

In addition, our method of fascia installation actually makes the product stronger.  Sometimes, on the wider fascia boards, a problem called “oil canning” or rippling/buckling can occur.  Here at Callen, we prevent that from happening by pressure bending the aluminum.  This makes the aluminum actually denser and stronger, which makes it last longer.  In addition, it looks more decorative, as this process adds a line you can see all the way around the house.  If you don’t do this process, and the aluminum moves, it can actually pull the nails right out.

Ventilation is a key component of your soffit system not to be overlooked.  Part of the soffit’s job is to be sure that air travels through the vents into the attic.  A blocked soffit vent can spell big trouble for your home, so it is critical these are open and clear.  In addition, it’s important to make sure that the attic insulation is not too tight, and that there is either a valve or baffle into the attic so the attic can breathe, and alleviate any condensation that may gather in the soffit.  We recommend one vent be placed about every eight feet.  Our system is unique, in that it is a perforated soffit vent system, which looks just like the soffit panels and therefore blends together and looks great, while serving an important function.

How do you know if you don’t have enough soffit ventilation?  We find mold and mildew on the outside of existing homeowners soffits all the time.  However, not only could this be a problem with soffit venting, it could also be a roof leak.  Consequently, let the professionals at Callen look at your home and diagnose the issue with a complete inspection.

While we’re replacing your soffit and fascia, we also inspect all the wood.  If the wood is rotted or warped, we replace it.  The great thing about covering wood soffits and fascia with aluminum is that we don’t need to perform a complete tear off, and therefore can replace just the sections that are bad.  We find that a lot of times the gutter corner caps on older houses can leak pretty badly.  During our installation process, we pull off all the gutters and check all the wood, and if there are large areas that are bad, we can address them at that time.

Lastly, installation is normally very fast, with little mess.  Here at Callen, we clean up at the end of every day.  We pride ourselves on the fact that you wont find any piles of material lying around, or jagged metal pieces that might injure a child or cause issues doing normal household chores, like cutting the grass.  We usually work on one side of the house, working our way around the perimeter.  In fact, it is our policy that we haul everything away at the end of each day and therefore do not normally even need a dumpster.  We also use a special magnetic pick up to check the ground around the work area.

An average size house is typically competed in two to three days.  This can vary depending on the number of bends, angles, number of stories, type of house, etc.  A tall house may require ladders or even scaffolding.

Let Callen’s team of Exterior Product Specialists show you how replacing soffits and fascia can enhance your home’s appearance and functionality.