How to Install an All-Shingle Exterior With Fiber Cement Panels

I own and operate a siding installation company in northern Vermont along with my son, Darryl. Recently, a high-end custom home builder we like working with asked us to clad a three-story house entirely with fiber-cement shingle panels. Although we knew we’d be in for a head-scratching challenge—the large home had a lot of complex geometry and numerous window and door openings to work around—we agreed to do the project.

I’ve been in the trades for 40 years, first framing homes, then specializing in siding starting in 1994. My son joined me in 2001. Over the years, we’ve installed fiber-cement shingle panels on a whole house only a handful of times. When we’ve applied the faux shingles, it’s usually as accenting high up on gable-end walls or on dormers, with fiber-cement lap siding installed on the rest of the home.

Most builders we work with have an allotted price range for siding, and installing an all-shingle exterior with fiber-cement panels is too expensive. They are time consuming to install on a whole house, but they are long lasting and, aesthetically, they look a lot like wood shingles, more so than other faux-shingle products we’ve seen.

On this project, the homeowner chose HardieShingle straight edge panels with a 7-inch exposure. The 48‑inch-wide by 15 1/4-inch-high panel comes with a factory-painted “ColorPlus” finish on one side, which has a 15-year warranty. The shingles arrive on site bundled together in pairs (two mirror-image patterns are placed with the painted sides facing each other; a plastic protection sheet is inserted between the two to protect the factory paint). The individual shingle tab widths of the mirrored patterns vary slightly, which helps create a look of randomness of the shingles.

For the rest of Dudley's account, click here for the full article from the Journal of Light Construction.