Pull a piece of trim off a house here and you rarely find what you expected. Salt Lake County holds Utah's oldest housing stock, and many of these homes carry brick, original wood siding, an aluminum or vinyl layer added later, and a stucco patch somebody troweled on in between. Salt Lake City walls are archaeology. Before anyone quotes a re-clad, somebody needs to open a corner and find out what the wall is actually made of, and whether water has been sitting inside it.
A house in the older parts of Salt Lake County may have been re-sided two or three times without anything ever being removed. Aluminum went over wood in one era, vinyl went over aluminum in another, and somewhere in there a section got furred out and stuccoed because it was the fastest way to deal with a problem wall. Each layer hid the one beneath it. That is why a small blister or a soft spot on the current surface tells you almost nothing on its own. The damage you can see may be three assemblies removed from where water actually got in.
We send contractors who open the wall before they price it. That usually means pulling a course or two at the base, at a corner, and under whatever looks worst, then looking at the sheathing, the framing behind it, and whether any weather barrier is left. On older homes there often is not much: building paper gone brittle, or nothing at all. Once you know what layers exist and what condition the wood is in, the conversation changes from picking a color to deciding how much of the wall assembly has to be rebuilt and how far the repair has to reach.
Plenty of older Salt Lake City homes are brick, and brick behaves differently from anything nailed over a frame. It absorbs water, holds it, and releases it slowly, and it depends on being able to dry toward the outside. When somebody adds cladding, foam, or a heavy coating over brick without accounting for drying, moisture that used to leave the wall stays in it instead. You see the result at the mortar joints, at the base of the wall where salts push to the surface, and on interior finishes along the coldest elevations of the house.
Mixed walls make it harder still. It is common here to find brick on the front and a framed, sided addition on the back, joined by a detail nobody documented. The transition between two different assemblies is exactly where flashing has to do its work, and on a house that has been altered repeatedly it is often the piece that got skipped. A contractor who regularly works on older stock will look at those joints first, because they explain more failures than the open field of a wall ever does.
On a house of unknown history, a quote written from the curb is a guess. Two homes on the same block, built the same year, can have completely different walls by now depending on who owned them and what got done in the 1970s. We would rather have a contractor spend an hour opening three small areas and photographing what is inside than hand you a number that has to change the moment the cladding comes off. Surprises found in advance are scope you agreed to. Surprises found mid-job are change orders you did not.
That inspection should also settle where the water is coming from, because the wall is frequently the victim rather than the source. Water showing up mid-wall may be arriving at the roof edge or running off a window opening above it, and those are separate trades and separate jobs. We will tell you plainly when what you actually need is a roofer or a window contractor. Our side of it is the cladding, the trim, the soffit and fascia, and the sheathing and moisture barrier behind them. Call 801-644-9000 and describe what you are seeing.
Usually yes, at least on any elevation being redone. Layered cladding hides rot, traps moisture, and makes it impossible to install flashing and a weather barrier correctly. Going back over it repeats the original mistake and buries the evidence one layer deeper. There are cases where a sound layer can stay, but that is a decision made after somebody has opened the wall and looked at it, not before.
It is a moisture problem showing up on the wall, which is our lane. Salts come to the surface when brick gets wet repeatedly and dries slowly. The cause is usually grade, splashback, a failed sealant joint, or a coating that stopped the brick from drying outward. A contractor should trace the water path before anything gets coated, patched, or covered, because sealing the face of the wall often makes it worse.
Often yes, on a repair scale. Profiles from older Utah homes can usually be milled or closely matched, and a good crew will salvage sound material to patch the elevations you look at most. Whole-house matching gets harder once several eras of material are already on the same building. The practical approach is deciding which elevations need to read as original and which can move to one new system.
A minute of detail now saves an hour of guessing later, on both ends.
