Fitting composite facade cladding to your facade

Composite is the material I get the most questions about when somebody wants to change something on the outside of their house. I understand that. It looks tight, you do not have to go along it with a brush every few years, and in a photo you can hardly tell it from real wood. What is not in those photos is how it behaves in full sun, what happens when it gets a scratch, and why two orders of the same panel do not always come out the same colour. That is what this page is about.

What I do and what I do not do

I do not sell panels. No showroom, no warehouse full of colours, no brand of my own. What I do is come round, measure up the facade, think with you about which panel suits your house, order it through the wholesaler where I get the rest of my material, and fit it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Almost everything you read about composite online comes from people who sell panels, and they have an interest in you choosing a particular product. My interest is that the facade still looks good years from now, because if it does not, I am the one coming back.

Have you already bought the panels somewhere, or would you rather do that yourself? Then I will fit them. Just say so beforehand, because I need to know which profile it is going to be before I work out the batten frame underneath. With material you supply yourself, the guarantee on it sits with you and not with me.

What composite actually is

Composite is a mix of wood fibre and plastic, pressed into a board or a profile. So it is not wood and not fully plastic, and it does not behave like either. It does not rot, it does not need oiling or staining, and insects leave it alone. At the same time it moves more than wood under heat, and that is exactly where fitting goes wrong for anyone who treats it like a stack of planks.

Roughly speaking there are two families. Solid boards, heavy and flat, with a tight modern look. And hollow profiles with chambers in them, lighter and usually cheaper, with an embossed grain that looks like timber boards. Which of the two I advise depends on your facade, the height, how much sun it catches and whether you walk past it close up every day. If you want to look more widely at what can go on a facade, have a look at facade cladding and the materials that come into it.

The batten frame is the real work

What you see are the panels. What decides whether it goes well is what sits behind them. Composite hangs off a timber batten frame on the existing facade, and between the two belongs a ventilated cavity. That cavity is not a luxury. Moisture always gets behind facade cladding, through driving rain along the joints and through vapour from inside the house. If it cannot get out, it sits trapped against your wall or against the batten frame itself, and then the material on the outside is not the problem.

That batten frame is plain carpentry, and it is the part I put the most time into. It has to be flat, which a facade rarely is. It has to give the fixing points the manufacturer specifies. And it has to run so that water getting behind it can drain away instead of standing on a batten. For the rest of the carpentry and fitting work the same principle holds: what you do not see decides how long it stays good.

Vertical or horizontal

Vertical composite facade cladding makes a facade look taller and narrower, horizontal makes it look wider and lower. That is the aesthetic side, and you choose that yourself.

The practical side is that the direction of the panels sets the direction of the batten frame, because those two run at right angles. With vertical panels the batten frame runs horizontally, and then there is a row of battens lying across the path the water would take down. The answer is a second layer of battens underneath running the other way, but that is extra work and extra material. Which is straight away the honest answer to why fitting vertically often works out a bit dearer.

The drawbacks of composite facade cladding

Most pages say nothing about this, and I find that odd. If you know the drawbacks beforehand, they do not catch you out afterwards.

It expands in the heat

Composite moves along its length when it gets warm, and dark panels on a south facade get seriously hot on a hot day. That is why the material must never be fixed down tight. There has to be room at the ends and at the fixings, exactly as the supplier specifies. Fit a panel as if it were a plank and it will bow or pull its fixing out of line. This is the mistake I come across most often on work somebody else has done.

Colour differences between batches

Composite is produced in batches, and between two production batches the colour can differ slightly. Order a few extra panels later because you cut it too fine, or have one damaged panel replaced in a few years, and there is a real chance it will not quite match. That is why I would rather measure up once more and order everything in one go, with spares.

A scratch will not come out

On wood you sand a bit of damage away and touch it in. On composite you cannot. The top layer is the colour, and anything that goes through it stays visible. High up a facade that is rarely a problem. Where the bikes stand against the wall or where children play it is, and that is a reason to pick the colour or the panel differently there.

The material costs more than wood

Composite is dearer to buy than most timber species you could put on a facade. You buy that difference back in maintenance, because you do not have to go over it periodically with stain or paint. Whether that works out depends on how long you stay in the house and how much you would mind the painting on a timber facade.

Composite or wood

There is no answer that holds for everybody. You choose composite for the maintenance and for a facade that stays even. You choose wood because it lives, changes colour and is different board by board, and because you can touch it up. If you want a facade that looks much the same over the years, you end up with composite. If you actually like a facade going grey, you end up with wood facade cladding and the way it ages.

What I always add to that: composite is less forgiving of bad fitting than wood. Wood that moves a fraction, you do not notice. Composite that has no room to move, you see.

Colour, and what it does to a facade

I have no range, so I am not selling you a colour. What I can do is tell you what a colour does on a facade, because I see it at every house I visit.

Anthracite and black

Anthracite and black keep a facade calm and let the window frames, doors and planting stand out. They are also unforgiving. Every unevenness in the surface catches the light and shows, so a dark facade asks for a flatter batten frame than a light one. And dark gets hot, which comes straight back to the expansion above. On a south facade that is a reason to keep the detailing more generous.

Wood look

Wood look, from light shades through to a deep walnut, is what most people are after: the look of wood without the painting. From a distance it works well. Close up you see the grain repeating, because it is a pressed profile and not a grown tree. So always look at a real sample in daylight, held up against your own facade. Colours on a screen lie, and on a facade that is an expensive mistake.

What the price per square metre depends on

I do not put figures on this site, because a price per square metre without the facade in front of you says nothing. What drives the price can be named. The panel is the biggest item. After that comes the ratio between flat work and edge work: a blank side wall goes quickly, a front facade full of window frames, corners and a dormer does not, because every edge needs a profile and cutting to fit. On top of that the height counts, whether I can reach it without a scaffold, and whether old cladding has to come off.

If the work runs up against the roof edge or the fascia board, that is often the moment to take the roofing work there along in one go instead of coming back for it later. If the cladding belongs to an extension or an annexe, it sits in the same programme as the rest of the shell and not as a loose job at the end.

How it starts

Send me a WhatsApp with a few photos of the facade and what you have in mind. I usually reply the same day and come and look shortly after. I work from Nieuwegein, and beyond that in places including Utrecht and IJsselstein.

After that visit you know which panel I would choose and why, what the layout of the facade will look like and where the uncertainties sit. Only then do I order anything. I work on my own, so you have one point of contact from the first measurement to the last corner profile.