Cedar siding vs. Hardie board

July 8, 2023 7:11 AM

Tell me what you know about cedar siding (painted or stained) versus cement board. This is my ideal "look" for my house. I think this is probably cedar siding that's been painted. I'm tempted by Hardie board, though, due to the promise of lower maintenance. What should I be considering?

It's a mid-60s ranch in a Berkshires-adjacent climate. Strong and full sun on the western and eastern exposures, which are the "long" sides of the ranch. I prefer the look of clapboard or cedar, painted a very dark gray-blue, but I've been told the cement board needs to be re-painted less frequently.

However, a contractor just told me he recommends painting both cedar siding or Hardie board every ten years, and the main advantage of Hardie in not the frequency of re-painting but its resistance to rot and pests (which is not nothing--we have a lot a woodpeckers around here, and it's damp 9 months of the year).

Hardie board has a lot of colors, but none of them are exactly right. The grays are too light and the blacks are black. I suppose we could paint the dark gray a little darker, but would that mean we'd have to re-paint more frequently?

Can you tell me what you know about durability, maintenance, and upfront costs of cedar vs Hardie? The house currently has aluminum siding.

Thank you.

posted by Ollie to Home & Garden (23 answers total)

The simple answer is cedar siding. There might be other natural wood options, check for price vs. maintenance.

What is wrong with cement board are two things.

In general in the entire construction industry, "maintenance-free" means extremely ugly and impossible to maintain after a relatively short period of time. You can apply this rule to vinyl and other plastics and all composites. Specifically for cement products, they are very vulnerable to fungi and mosses that sit on the outside, and are not dangerous, but are hard to remove. Natural wood products have an inbuilt natural resistance to these many different organisms. But buildings need to be maintained, that is a fact of life. They are comparable to organic beings. We need to be maintained, too. I'm not being mystical here, and will unfold as necessary.

Second, as of now, all cement production exudes gross amounts of CO2. That might be different in five years. But now is now.
posted by mumimor at 7:37 AM on July 8, 2023 [11 favorites]

No suitable colours in the James Hardie Dream Collection?
posted by kate4914 at 7:38 AM on July 8, 2023

Response by poster: [I have more samples arriving soon from the Dream collection. I have ordered many samples from the other collections.]
posted by Ollie at 7:40 AM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

We put cement board siding on our garage 10 years ago, still looks brand new.
posted by Max Power at 7:50 AM on July 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

I concur with Mumimor on the specific maintainability of the two categories. Doing rework, repairs, or alterations on wood siding generally is easy. Work on fiber cement siding materials is not.

I do think that well-installed fiber cement siding can look very good, but not everyone gets a top-notch install. I'd look at examples of local contractors' work very closely. No matter what material you choose, the install makes a huge difference. Look for examples of re-siding, not new construction, so you can see how well the contractors accommodated the imperfections of an existing home exterior.
posted by Glomar response at 8:11 AM on July 8, 2023

That is the look we fell in love with too. Check this out, Hardie Iron Gray.

We ended up with Iron Gray Hardie siding and replaced our windows with black ones. I can't think of a more expen$ive choice, esp. the black windows. I believe Iron Gray is a color that is stocked nationally and it is very dark. Other custom gray colors will likely cost even more. We offset the darkness of the siding with stained cedar trim and shutters. We're really happy with the quality of the siding... carpenter bees gave up, and it is going to be much easier to maintain than wood/vinyl/stucco.
posted by superelastic at 8:14 AM on July 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Anecdotal, but my neighbor has cedar siding and I've lived next to him for 15 years. During that time he's painted his house twice and it needs to be done again. He told me that the natural oils in the cedar means that it needs to be painted more frequently, even when using a high quality, oil-based exterior paint.

I suggest that you go the cement board route but lime wash it, don't paint. You'll get a beautiful patina and less maintenance,
posted by mezzanayne at 9:09 AM on July 8, 2023

I've had experience with hardie board siding on multiple houses, including my own. In multiple houses, including my own, the board has flaked/rotted out in specific areas, such as where a gable meets a roof, where a wall meets the patio. These are areas that have more moisture than others. It's not supposed to do this, but it has.

My house has had the same siding for +20 years and the (original!!_ paint job has worn very well - it basically looks new except that it's faded and there's some damage from vines. But the rotted areas are going to be very difficult if not impossible to repair.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:42 AM on July 8, 2023

Your "ideal look" looks to be yakisugi, also called sho sugi ban. This is charred wood, ideally cypress ("sugi" means cypress), but sometimes other woods are used. It might be a black stain though.

As you might imagine, you can buy pre-charred siding, but you can char it yourself with a weed burner.
posted by adamrice at 10:18 AM on July 8, 2023 [9 favorites]

I think your ideal look is definitely wood, maybe cedar, but it looks like it's been stained rather than painted.
I have Hardie plank and like it very much due to the zero maintenance, but I don't think you can quite achieve the knotty variegated look with cementitious boards.
posted by mmf at 10:26 AM on July 8, 2023

In the late '90s, my parents sold their 90-year old house, and one of the fantastic things about it was that it was shingled, and had never been painted-- only stained.

People don't know that once you paint, you are stuck with repainting-- it's incredibly hard to go back.

Paint peels. Stain doesn't. The house they lived in for 20 years was re-stained just as a minor fix-up once before it was sold. Their subsequent house (that had been painted) had a side that was exposed to the prevailing weather, and also had some sort of overhang-melting-snow-icicle issue that meant that it would start to look bad, with paint peeling after only 5 years or so, and the whole house would be repainted every 8-10 years.

Repainting means scraping off flaking paint, sanding, priming, and painting (which can be done with a gun). Re-staining only entails that last step.

Both houses were sided with cedar shingle.
posted by Maxwell_Smart at 10:47 AM on July 8, 2023 [9 favorites]

Here in the dank-ass Mid-Atlantic I prefer Hardie board and haven't had to touch it since I installed it almost a decade ago. YMMV but I recently re-sided a shed with it based on that, and it looks great.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:00 AM on July 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Further to the paint vs stain maintenance issue: my sister put a solid latex stain on her pine board and batten and it peeled after a few years. Was it a question of application? Dunno. I used a semi-transparent latex on mine and, where it doesn't look fresh, it's weathered, but at least it won't require scraping to recoat.
posted by kate4914 at 11:17 AM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Latex stain isn't stain. Contrariwise, it works exactly like acrylic paint. I'm seeing ads for organic stains now, but I haven't tried them. Linseed oil is a traditional stain here, but there are others, and you should investigate which are traditionally used in your region.
posted by mumimor at 1:03 PM on July 8, 2023

All this depends on whether you want a look that is authentic, or not. Vinyl siding is plastic that is made to look like clapboard siding. Same thing for aluminum siding, which you have and do not want any more. So, why replace one kind of fake wood siding with another kind, like cement? If you like, and want, the look that you linked to, which is wood, installed shiplap style, stained dark or charred, then go for the real thing and don't look back. If your house is in a "dank-ass" woodland setting and you're worried about mildew and such, cut back the trees and let the sunshine in. Just recognize that the authenticity of wood, however you finish it, requires maintenance from time to time. But the inauthenticity of cement, vinyl, aluminum, or anything else pretending to be wood will bother you every time you look at it.
posted by beagle at 3:40 PM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I did 3 sides of a part of my house in Hardie board 12 years ago or so. I just did the 4th side and the paint matched perfectly. You can buy preprinted Hardie or paint it yourself any color. It takes paint really well. The install is also dead simple if you can make straight lines.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:57 PM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

We did Hardie board and we love it. Yes, you can get a more organic, natural or specific look with stained cedar and whatnot, but for durability I don't think there's a better option than Hardie right now. We paid about 15% more for Hardie board versus vinyl. I feel like it was a great investment.

But yes, choose an installer with a good reputation and many examples on their website. Our contractor had addresses we could visit and inspect, and we thought they all looked great. Coulda paid less, but it's the covering of our home and we thought it was money well spent.
posted by SoberHighland at 4:09 PM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

A few years ago I replaced the (painted) cedar shakes on our 1916 house. I was very surprised do discover that they were original -- they lasted over 100 years.

It's harder to screw up installation of cedar than engineered products, and yeah, it needs painting and/or staining from time to time, but you'll have that with anything unless you think the color you pick today will be something you'll be happy with forever.

And as others have pointed out, if you care about the climate at all, wood is the way to go.
posted by Ickster at 7:35 PM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hardie's 2010 published Australian figures can be found here.

Page 8 indicates that an FC product represents about 20% more embodied energy than a timber clad wall (weatherboard is the Australian term) and less embodied energy than most other options. The figure for FC products has almost certainly come down a little since, the timber figure won't have budged.

So on environmental terms they aren't that far apart and could easily be swamped by other factors. Like if you are looking at using old growth or badly sourced cedar the FC option is probably better.

Which may not be a factor for you at all, though it should be, however I'm responding to a couple of comments above.

Although, if you care about the enviro side of things, find a way to live with the aluminium, done well it'll outlast you.

Also consider black is currently very fashionable and it's likely you'll want to change it later, make sure that is as simple as a repaint.
posted by deadwax at 4:20 AM on July 9, 2023

I went with Certainteed shingles, as they had better color choices. Going on 10 years now and they still lóok new. We're in the DC area.
posted by wkearney99 at 6:01 AM on July 9, 2023

Response by poster: Thank you everyone. All these answers are good food for thought.
posted by Ollie at 3:16 PM on July 9, 2023

The last point: I see several dark colored homes, and most of the day you can't tell what they are made of. So I think if you were doing a natural stain, then wood would make sense. But many days your home will be in shadow and at night, the differences will only be noticeable to you. Most of the time, you won't be able to see the color variations unless you are taking a long look.
posted by The_Vegetables at 6:40 PM on July 9, 2023

You didn't ask, but one thing to keep in mind is that there are good non-aesthetic reasons *not* to paint a house black. Dark paint absorbs more energy and therefore has to deal with added expansion / contraction issues; it can also contribute significantly to the cost of cooling a home in more southerly climes, although up in the Berkshires a little extra heat from insolation might be welcome.
posted by aspersioncast at 1:24 PM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]