meet rob of builddirect!

Today’s renovation post is from Rob Jones, chief blogger, social media practitioner, and online marketer for BuildDirect, who was kind enough to come school us all on all things exterior siding! BuildDirect is an online flooring and building materials company and has kindly supplied the fiber cement siding for our “House that DFM Built” project. Below, Rob explains what fiber cement siding is and what some of the benefits of it are. (So excited about this!)

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First of all – hello!

It’s nice to be invited to post here, and a lot of fun working with Erin showing you all something of upcoming trends in building materials that can be applied to your designer’s imaginations. And where fiber cement siding isn’t exactly brand new, it is certainly less well-known than aluminum or wood siding. So, here’s the skinny on fiber cement.

OK. So what is fiber cement siding exactly?

It’s a manufactured item made by combining cement, sand, and cellulose fiber into an extremely durable material ready to stand up to the elements for a long, long time. The materials are steam pressurized so that you’re getting a very densely packed material that withstands moisture, wind, and other sources of abrasion and wear. The materials are painted in the factory, and tend to hold paint much longer than standard siding, which makes it pretty low maintenance, and with an enduring look.

And as for looks, fiber cement is generally made to resemble wood siding, with all kinds of visual effects also created at the factory to get you the look you’re after. You can get that pristine East Coast clapboard look, or a more rustic Midwestern feel. And colors for fiber cement are also pretty plentiful to suit whatever you’ve got in mind. In the style stakes, your options are pretty wide open.

The selection of fiber cement we’ve chosen for the “House That DFM Built” project is ‘Colonial Pewter’ which is a straight-edged shingle style. Here’s an angle shot of it to give you an idea what it looks like up close:

These are, as mentioned, shingle style. But, you can also get longer pieces in a clapboard style, too, if that’s your preference.

You might notice in this shot that fiber cement like this is subtlety textured, and uniformly painted to resemble a real wood shingle. Attention to detail where looking like wood is concerned is a pretty big priority with the best of fiber cement. The advantage here is that it’s extremely tough, and with much less involvement from you as a homeowner to retain it’s original look. Yet, you still get that cozy warmth that a wood-grained style siding is known for.

So, that’s an intro to fiber cement siding. I’m looking forward to seeing how it’s going to look on ‘our’ house. And of course, I’m interested to see what you guys are going to think of it. In the meantime, if you’ve got questions about fiber cement, leave them in the comments section of this post, and we’ll see what we can do to flesh some of this out for you.

Thanks!

Rob.

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Thanks for joining us, Rob!