It looks like I may get plans for a garage approved by the Historical Commission! Yay! Nosy twits that allow just about anything from big developers but really really care about my garage, carefully designed to fit the house and everything. Anyway, vinyl siding is abhorrent unto them. (As is vinyl fencing, which is absurd - they’d rather I have a peeling wood fence than one of those nice vinyl ones they have now.) My options are brick and such (possible, but expensive), or wood substitutes like Hardipanel. So I’ve been reading the product literature on the “James Hardie” products, but of course that doesn’t tell me if the stuff sucks or not. Does it?
Also, if I could do anything I wanted I’d like the garage to match the house, which is brick until the part where the roof starts, the name of which escapes me, and painted stucco up to the top. (The stucco is painted a very pleasing taupe color, which looks lovely with the white trim, and I’d like to carry that over to the garage.) When considering Hardipanel or Hardiplank or whatever confusing word for specific product, consider both doing the whole garage in it (the cheap way) or doing the bottom half in brick and the top pointy bit either in stucco or Hardipanel.
In short - does it suck? and any commments on it? Thanks!
Last year I used Hardipanel in 4x8 sheets on a shed and I loved it. I was going to use T-111 but the Hardipanel was cheaper by a couple bucks per sheet, came pre-primed, it’s impervious to rodents and insects, and won’t rot like wood. They weigh a ton though, and are really difficult but not impossible to get into place by one person working alone. Also, do yourself a favor and get a stone-cutting blade for your circular saw and/or table saw. I went through about 4 or 5 carbide blades. And wear a mask when cutting- the fine dust they send up is (I believe) a carcinogen.
Entire house in Hardiboard. Shakes and siding. Great product, but definitely need proper nailers and saws to work with it. Make sure your contractor installs this product on a regular basis. I know you can get some Hardi products already prefinished.
I see it comes in colors, but yet the sheet I’m looking at says it needs painting. Am I looking at two different products? The names are a little confusing to me.
Also, has anybody had it on for a while? How does it wear? (I’d be hiring somebody to put it on - I install doorknobs and drip irrigation myself, I hire somebody else to install garages.)
I haven’t used the stuff, but I will if I ever need siding.
It is considered high end siding, and the people I talked to prefer it over any other type of siding. It lasts forever; being cement, it cannot rot or get eaten by termites. It can hold its painted color for decades.
On the down side, it is cement so nails cannot be dimpled into the boards without breaking. You have to put the heads flush atop the panels, and predrilling is a good idea. Tooling the caulk can help hide the joints between panels, but the joints will probably telegraph through the paint a little (then again, stucco should have joints as well.) It also soaks up a lot of paint, though that helps it hold the painted color for a long time.
We see many, many developers moving towards Hadiplank siding. It has a good reputation and is long-lasting.
As to why the HC is so in love with wood over vinyl fencing - well, their the Historic Commission and I’m assuming they’ve got some standards for review. I’ve seen some nice wrought-iron looking aluminum fencing that would probably pass muster and you don’t have anywhere near the maintenance issues as with wood.
We’re thinking of brick posts with wrought-aluminum fencing. The thing that’s irritating is that they let some big company buy a lot down the street from me and subdivide it and cram two little itty bitty “Craftsman-inspired” homes on it that don’t fit the neighborhood at all, but I who bought my house because I wanted a cool old house and have done so much freaking work on it, I can’t have the fence I want because of some dumb rule about specific materials that was probably made when vinyl fences were ugly.
Oh, and while I’m not crazy about my chain link fence, the rules are also that because it’s grandfathered in, if I touch it at all during this project it has to be replaced with something they approve of. The HC is really making the costs of this project rise. Of course I want to preserve the integrity of the neighborhood! They don’t even like me building a garage at all because “most people park on the street here.” Actually most people have little wooden garages in the back yard that they use as sheds these days.