OK, silly question, but I was driving through the countryside recently, and noticed that the siding on the barns are consistently vertical.
I’ve never seen vertical siding on a house.
The only thought I have is that for barns the siding is actually structural, since there’s rarely anything on the side of the barn except for these vertical slats. Possibly there’s some structural advantage to verticality?
Cecil has a great entry on why barns are universally red, but I’ve never seen anything on this vertical siding thing.
Siding on barns is typically done very cheaply, just planks nailed on, no overlap, often gaps to let the air through. If it were horizontal, rain running down the side would enter the barn everytime is dropped from board to board. With the planks vertical, only the rain that hits a gap will go in.
Houses are done much more carefully with vapour barriers, insulation, and overlap between each board to keep the rain on the outside (or plastic/aluminum siding).
Sheds and barns make use of economical siding planks that connect together, like tongue an groove. The connecting points are smooth, not overlapping (like typical siding on a home).
They form channels that are fine in a vertical layout, but would collect water in a horizontal layout.
As overlapping styles become more popular and affordable, more sheds and barns have typical home style siding - with the overlapping boards or vinyl siding.
But for building a work barn and shed, the t&g pine siding boards are very cost effective and easy to work with…and they result in vertical seams.
T111 plywood siding is usually oriented vertically, for the reasons pointed out by Philster. It is so widely used in Alaska, the Anchorage Buiding Safety Division will not approve its use if it is oriented horizontally.
Actually, most old barns have shiplap siding, in my experience. Not tongue and groove. Shiplap planks wouldn’t leak if used horizontally, though they wouldn’t shed water quite as efficiently as they do if used vertically. And in fact, many barns do have the planks put on horizontally. To my knowledge, the vertical thing is mostly an east of the Great Plains phenomena, at least on this continent.
I’ve never seen to this day a barn sided with the sort of finished product you’d find on a house, though I’m sure there must be a few here and there. These days they mostly end up with either just painted OSB or tin.
Board and batten siding is cheap to make and install. The original method was to rough cut logs into boards, apply the boards vertically to a wall, then cover the gaps with thin battens. This method saves wood in that the boards don’t have to be trimmed to a standard width and there’s less overlap than with horizontal stringers, and it saves labor in that it’s easier to layout, it’s easier to hang boards vertically and there’s less nailing involved.
Metal and sheet goods like plywood and OSB are cheaper, so I’d assume that board and batten is still used on barns out of a sense of tradition. The siding style was also popular for homes back in the Seventies, back when John Denver was making hits.
Board and batten siding is by far the most common for wooden houses (and non-wooden houses with ornamental wooden siding) here in Norge. A quick look up and down my block reveals two houses with clapboard-style siding versus maybe twenty with overlapping vertical boards.
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