Two suggestions:

1. Look at examples of the architectural style that you are building for colors of siding, trim, roofing and how they are used;
2. Get actual samples out on your job site, place them vertically as they will be on your house (there are few, if any, horizontal finishes on a house), and move them from sunlight to shade to view, before deciding.

The larger the samples you can get to your site, the better you will be able to see how they look in sun and shade.

If it were me, I'd wait until the house was framed and sheathed, in order to also get a sense of magnitude and scale for each of the material and color options.

It's worth taking the time to get it right, since once in place the finish materials are likely to be there a long, long time.

Good luck on your project.

We called the vinyl companies and requested larger sections to help us choose. The small samples just aren't large enough. The colors on our computer are always much different than the samples they send.

virgil and newbie...Thanks for the help, The house is framed and I've brought the samples out there but they are just too small to get a good idea. I'm getting larger samples. I just checked them with our roof and they both go so that didn't help.

Annie you make a good point about the fading, do you know how long it takes for that to be noticable? Unfortunately for help with the decision (I don't mind either of them faded a bit) but I guess fortunate for long term happiness with it.

I don't know how long, but the greater the sun exposure, the faster the fade.

When picking brick, the brick folks were able to give us houses that used the particular brick. We drove by and were able to see it full size. It worked great. The siding folks might have full sized examples for you to view.

Be very careful of darker colors in vinyl. I don't think fading is much of an issue anymore, but there are a lot of other problems with dark colors. Why they keep making some of these colors is beyond me.

If you are doing one of the vinyls that look like cedar shakes, I don't think the color is an issue. In other types of vinyl the dark colors can cause all kinds of problems. We had all kinds of weird distortions on ours and that was their explanation, "it happens with dark colors"

Jamie..that is a bit disturbing. I am about ready to chose midnight surf from gentek. Do you mind telling me what you have and what company it is from. Also what do you mean by weird distortions.

Thanks.

There are a lot of different distortions with vinyl siding. Usually they blame it on inproper installation, or melting from reflections off windows. But a lot of it is just in the darker colors. You read about it mostly in the darker blues and grays. Why they sell these colors beats me.

I love the darker colors. We did a dark gray and it has been a disaster. I would go with a lighter color if I did it again. There is a clay color that is very popular. That was our 2nd choice, wish I had made it my first.