siding on houses invariably is going to get damaged at some point during the life of the house whether you got shingles clapboard fiber cement or vinyl siding what we're going to show you in this series is some simple ways to make the repairs by removing and replacing the actual siding pieces without doing damage to the surrounding siding or even the paint finish on that siding so with a few simple tools and maybe 15 minutes to 45 minutes you can replace a piece of siding and any of those different types so here we've got some damage on the vinyl siding there's a couple of approaches I can take to making repair here ones like a temporary patch you could do say damage happens during the winter and you just want to tied it over till the springtime when you can remove an entire panel it's quick and it's easy all it is is taking a piece of vinyl siding trimming off a couple of parts on it so that it slides up under a joint and then pop rivets on the bottom you can see the problem though is you've got a vertical line on both sides you can see it a little bit so the important thing here is where you make the cuts here I have a an extra piece of vinyl siding it's going to be wide enough to fit over the patched area then we're going to have to cut off the hem at the top and the butt lock down at the bottom now we don't want to just cut it off right here in line with that hem we want to cut it up a little bit higher so that we get an interlock between the pieces so what I'll do to get there is flip it over and just use a sharp knife now this is a blade I just put in the knife and I'm going to cut just below those punch outs for the nails and you don't need a straightedge to do this just making a good buy I cut is fine once I score through with the sharp knife a couple bends and that piece will come right off now at the bottom it's going to be a little bit more difficult because I'll be cutting writer near that eased edge at the bottom so I'm going to do this by putting the vinyl on a good stiff edge on these horses and using care so I don't cut the tip of my thumb off I'll just score a line again by eye this one I'm going to make two scores I'm going to make a second pass so that I know I'm getting deep enough in it'll make it easier to snap that apart there and now slips right in place so we're just going to make two holes one about an inch in from each side and take our handy pop rivet tool now sometimes you can get a color matched one this one isn't color matched but it'll be fine I can always dab a dab of colored paint on it later it's white and sometime in the future when I have more time I can replace the entire panel just pull the old one out no one goes in all set you