Facade cladding: wood, composite, plastic or brick slips

Facade cladding is a second skin over your wall. Boards or panels on a batten frame, with air in between, fixed to the brickwork or the timber that is already standing there. It changes the look of your house more than anything else on the outside, it keeps the rain off the wall, and while that wall is open anyway you can fit insulation behind it.

What it is not: a cure for damp or cracks. Those take no notice of a panel in front of them. They only become invisible, and that is exactly what you do not want. If something is wrong behind the wall, I sort that first and only then does the cladding go over it.

Most people who end up here are still comparing, not ringing. That is why the material comes first on this page and the quote comes last. It does me no good if you regret your choice in a few years.

Why people choose exterior facade cladding

Roughly three reasons, usually mixed together.

Looks. A dated facade turns into a different house. That is the reason most people name first and then half apologise for. No need, it is a perfectly good reason.

Protection. Driving rain in the Netherlands comes mostly out of the south-west, and that one wall always takes more than the rest. Cladding catches it, and the cavity behind drains off whatever still gets through.

Insulation. If you are screwing a batten frame onto the wall anyway, the space between those battens is the cheapest insulation you will ever fit. Do not do it right away and you never will, because then the cladding has to come off again.

Wood

Wood is the material people fall in love with and then spend the longest negotiating with themselves about. Fair enough, because it is the only material in this list that is alive.

Untreated wood weathers grey. That is not a fault, that is wood, and on a modern facade it can be beautiful. Only it does not go grey evenly. The side that catches sun and rain moves faster than the piece under an overhang, and you see that difference. If you want to keep the colour, you are looking at a treatment you repeat at some interval. How often depends on the species, the colour and how hard that wall gets it, so I say that only once I have seen it.

Wood also moves. It expands and shrinks with the weather, and that is why fitting it differs from fitting a panel: room to move, fixings that allow it, end grain that does not stand in water. Get that wrong and after the first wet winter you see twisted boards and screw holes splitting.

The full weighing up between species, profiles and finish sits on the page about wood facade cladding.

Composite

Composite is wood fibre mixed with plastic, pressed into boards that look like wood without being wood. It is meant for anyone who wants the warm look and not the maintenance.

That mostly holds true. No painting, no oiling, and the colour stays put far better than on painted wood. But there are two things you rarely read first in the brochure. Composite carries on colouring slightly at the start, so do not buy too tight and keep a few boards back in case one ever has to be replaced. And composite expands a lot in the sun, which means the joints and the fixings have to allow that movement. A composite facade pushed tight shut will bow at the first real heat.

The material is heavier than wood and most systems are tied to one brand, so profiles, clips and corner trims come out of the same range. What that means for choosing and fitting sits on the page about composite facade cladding.

Plastic

Plastic facade cladding is one of the lowest maintenance options of the four. Weatherboards or panels in PVC, usually with a click system, that you keep clean with water and a brush and otherwise leave alone. No painting, no oil, no greying.

With this material you often hear a brand name instead of a material. There are several manufacturers making comparable click systems. I do not sell systems and I hold no dealership, so I look with you at what suits the wall and what is available.

Honest about the downside: up close plastic looks like plastic. On a dormer, a gable or a fascia board you hardly notice, on a whole front wall at eye level you do. Plastic expands with heat as well, so here too the fixing has to allow movement. And a deep scratch or a cracked board is not something you touch up, that board comes out.

Brick slips

Brick slips are thin slices of brick or ceramic that you bond onto an insulation board or straight onto the wall and then point. The result is brickwork to look at, without a new wall having been built.

This is the option for anyone who wants a facade that still looks exactly the same years from now. Maintenance is practically nil, beyond keeping an eye on the pointing. The price here sits not in the material but in the hours: bonding, setting the slips, pointing, and all of it inside the temperature range where adhesive and pointing mortar may be worked. In a frost that work stops, and that is a planning question you would rather know beforehand than halfway through.

Brick slips combine well with external wall insulation, and then it is at once the heaviest of the four to carry out. The wall gets thicker, the window frames sit deeper, and the roof edge and the rainwater downpipe have to come along.

Maintenance and lifespan side by side

Short version, without pretty promises.

Wood asks the most and gives the most back. Composite and plastic ask little, but what breaks you replace instead of repair. Brick slips ask almost nothing once they sit right, but a mistake made while fitting stays visible: a repair in brickwork always shows.

And the same holds for all four. The lifespan of a facade is not decided by the material on the outside, but by what sits behind it. A timber facade on a well ventilated batten frame lasts longer than a plastic facade screwed tight against wet brickwork.

What sits behind the cladding

This is the part to watch when you compare quotes, precisely because you never see it again.

Onto the wall goes a batten frame, vertical or horizontal depending on the direction of the cladding. Between those sits the cavity where air has to be able to travel from the bottom upward, or the back of your cladding never dries. At the bottom a mesh against vermin, behind the battens a breather membrane, and at every window frame, every corner and every junction a trim that leads the water out instead of in.

Those junctions are the real work. A flat wall almost clads itself. It is the window frames, the dormer, the vents and the transition to the roof where the hours go. If the cladding runs up under the roof edge, I take on the fascia board and the roof edge at the same time, because doing those two separately means paying for scaffolding twice.

Fitting cladding to an existing wall

Cladding renovation comes in two flavours. Old cladding that is finished, usually painted wood that waited too long for maintenance. Or a bare wall that has never been clad and whose owner has had enough of the look of it.

Either way it starts at the substrate. The old cladding comes off, I look at what is under it, and I tell you honestly whether that carries a new batten frame. Sometimes that is an unwelcome conversation, because putting right a rotted timber substructure soon costs more than the new cladding itself.

Bear in mind as well that the wall gets thicker. Your window frames sit deeper, which usually looks better, but the roof overhang, the window sills and the rainwater downpipe have to come along in that dimension. If the cladding runs along with a bigger renovation, I would rather plan it in the same period as the rest of the outside work, so the scaffold goes up only once.

Facade cladding on a commercial building

On a commercial building or a restaurant little changes about the work itself, but a lot about the planning. The wall is often taller, so a scaffold or a cherry picker comes into it. The business usually has to keep running, so I plan the noise and the scaffolding around the opening hours. And some buildings carry requirements on how the cladding material behaves in a fire. Those I get from the supplier before we pick a material, not after.

What that means further for carrying out the work sits on the page about work on commercial premises and hospitality.

What facade cladding costs

I do not put figures on this site, because a figure without your wall beside it says nothing. What I can explain is what it rests on, so you can lay two quotes next to each other and understand why they differ.

The biggest item is almost never the material. It is the height, because the scaffolding hangs off that, and the number of breaks in the wall. A blank side wall is less work than the same area of wall with window frames, a dormer and a downpipe in it. On every quote, ask about the batten frame and the membrane. Those are the items you cannot check later, and that is exactly where the difference sits between a facade that stays up and a facade that looked good on handover day.

How I go about it

You send me photos of the wall. Preferably a few from a distance so I see the whole surface, plus some close-ups at the window frames and the roof edge. After that I come and measure, because dimensions read off a photo are wrong.

The facade work online at the moment is an upper floor I fitted with new cladding, in flat panels around the existing window frames and running up under the roof edge. Those photos were taken during the work, with the mobile tower still against the wall. It is panel material, so read it as an example of how a job like that runs and not as proof for a material you do not see lying there.

I work on my own, out of Nieuwegein, and I stand on the scaffold myself. So I can only work on one facade at a time and my planning is tight because of it. It also means you have one number and there is nobody to point at if something goes wrong. Besides Nieuwegein I work in the towns around it, so in Utrecht and the surrounding area you can ask me to come round as well.