Finishing the Cladding Joins and Corners

Where the fibre cement cladding boards butt up against each other, and on the corners around the shipping container house, there’s a little gap left where rain could get in. We had to come up with a plan to stop the rain and to make the cladding joins and corners a bit prettier.

The main outside walls of our house are 12m long; the length of a shipping container. The fibre cement boards don’t come in that length. Boards that long would be difficult to transport and will break easily. Therefore, for each row of cladding, we have to install more than one board. We want the joins to be as invisible as possible, and more importantly, waterproof. Once again we had to put on our thinking caps to solve this issue.

Ways to Fit The Cladding

We had two options with installing the boards:

• stagger the boards so the joins are not all on the same line
• Fit the boards so that the ends meet up at the same place making one long vertical line all the way up the house

If we had staggered the boards, we would have had to put a waterproof patch of some kind behind the join and then fill up the gap with something like paintable silicon.

We decided that the easier option would be to fit the boards so that we had one long vertical line to deal with. The easiest way to hide the gap would then be to fit a strip of something over it.

Gap Strip Options

There are many options available and these are the options we considered:

• Fibre cement strips: A cheap option in materials, but would have been labour-intensive to fit. A thin strip of fibre cement board is very likely to crack on installation. We would have had to be extremely careful when fitting.
• Plastic: We were concerned that plastic might become brittle in the sun and need replacing often
• Aluminium: A bit more expensive but very durable. Because of the strength in a length of aluminium, we could also use it to pull the boards flat against the container, making the resultant wall straighter. Also, if they every do need replacing, aluminium can be easily recycled, making it one of the greener options.

From the above, I’m sure you’ve already guessed what our choice was – the aluminium strips. So, we bought some aluminium flat bar for the joins and some aluminium angle to fit onto the corners.

Installing the Strips for the Cladding Joins and Corners

They aluminium was easily fitted with a few screws. We’ll fill in the gap behind the strip with silicon or with polyurethane expanding foam. We are going to try both options, and will get back to you once we have decided which we prefer.

Once the strips are installed and the gaps behind filled in, all that’s left is to paint them.

Also, a quick heads-up; We have a fantastic giveaway lined up for November. Don’t forget to watch out for it!