Cement board cladding installation in Hertfordshire

Installation Gallery

Maintenance free cement cladding

One of the great advantages of cement board cladding as a building material is its versatility. It looks just as good and works just as effectively on a new build house as it does on a very old property.

Take this 300-year-old former bakery in Hertfordshire as an example. Our client, a London property developer, had owned the building for some years and was gradually restoring it to its former glory. But he had come up against a snag with the external render, which was not only making the house look tired and defective but, more crucially, was letting in the damp.

Uneven render causing problems

Now as everyone will understand, wet walls in any house – let alone in one that is 300 years old – is very bad news. The problem was compounded by the variation in thickness of the render. Perhaps, because of its great age, there had been many coatings over the years, as in some places the render was eight inches thick!

The answer was, where necessary, to strip the walls back to the brickwork, then fit a vapour barrier before installing James Hardie feather-edge cement board cladding. This looks exactly like the style of timber cladding that might have adorned a building of this age, but with all the advantages of a material that doesn’t rot and is entirely maintenance-free.

New gutters and fascias needed

Having sorted out the walls, we turned our attention to the roofline, where the gutters were fixed onto the ends of the rafters. This meant that rainwater cascading down the roof was not properly draining away. The solution was to build a new timber framework under the overhang of the slate roof to accommodate a deeper fascia with new deep flow guttering and downpipes.

This was no ordinary installation and Summit Cladding took time and care to ensure that this 300-year-old building will have many more years to show off its fine features.

Categorised in: Guttering, James Hardie Cladding, Soffits & Fascias

This post was written by Summit Cladding