Step 4: Choose Your Materials

Painted Wood Siding

Advantages of painted wood siding include:

• Cost: it’s less expensive to manufacture than any other siding alternative

• Aesthetics: It has a pleasing and traditional appearance. It is also possible to be a little more creative with exterior design, since all you have to do is cut the trim the exact shape you want and paint it.

• Flexibility: If you decide 5 years down the road that you no longer want a green building, your dream color is only a coat of paint away.

• Resilience: Wood siding is more resistant to breaking, denting, and cracking than vinyl siding. When it does get scuffed or marred, it is fixable with only some caulk and paint.

Disadvantages of painted wood siding include:

• Maintenance: You really need to paint it every 5-10 years, or it will begin to look nasty and eventually rot

Vinyl Siding

Advantages of vinyl siding indlude

• No maintenance: (at least as compared to other alternatives) Other than a pressure washing every couple of years, you really shouldn’t have to do anything to your storage building.

• Match the house: Most houses have vinyl siding, and most homeowners can find something close enough from our selection of stock colors.

• Cost: while it costs a little more than painted wood siding, it is still much less prohibitive than other alternatives like masonry facades and hardiplank.

• Aesthetics: It looks nice.

Disadvantages of vinyl siding include:

• Fixed color: You can never change the color of the building without replacing the siding completely.

• Cost: It costs a little bit more than a comparable painted wood building

• Fragility: Vinyl siding is much more susceptible to flying stones, BB’s, and other projectiles.

There are many other types of siding available on our storage buildings. Here are a few of them:

HardiPlank: A concrete based horizontal lap siding

Pine T1-11: A relatively inexpensive “natural wood” option that can be stained or painted. It comes with natural cedar trim.

Pine Board & Batten: Vertical pine board siding with 2” wide battens covering the splices.

Cedar lap: A 4 ½” dutch Lap siding – the perfect complement to a log or wood-sided house.

Pine lap: Similar to the cedar siding, but pine paints much better. The perfect option if you want the traditional “clap-board” appearance.

LP SmartSide horizontal lap: This is similar in appearance to HardiPlank, but a little bit less costly.

Don’t see your siding listed? Just ask us…chances are we can get it!

Most of our storage buildings come standard with tarpaper and 30 year asphalt shingles, but other roofing options are available.

In addition to the exterior siding and roofing, there are a few other material choices that can be made. In the last several years, great strides have been made in developing building materials specifically for backyard storage buildings. Two products particularly stand out:

LP Techshield®:

This is a structural sheathing product that can be used on the roofs of all our buildings, and the walls of vinyl-sided buildings. It is essentially one-half inch thick oriented strand board with a backing of aluminum foil. What it does is simply reflect much of the radiation from the sun, and help keep the building cooler in the summer. Since it is based on an OSB product, at this point it carries exactly the same cost as our standard 4-ply plywood – you just need to let us know which one you want! http://www.lpcorp.com/techshield/

LP ShedFloor®:

As the name implies, this is a flooring material that is designed particularly for storage sheds. It is manufactured by the same process that creates the SmartSide® line of exterior siding products, and hence it has better moisture resistance than the standard, similarly priced plywood products. It is topped off with a pre-finished, textured surface that has a nice, uniform appearance.

That pretty much covers the building material options. Other builders have many options that we feel should not be made “optional,” such as pressure treated floor joists, 16” OC walls and rafters, and tarpaper under the shingles. Rest assured that all the “options” necessary for longevity and structural stability are “standard” on your Byler Barn!

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