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I am considering “HardieBoard” for my new house. How well does paint hold up on it? Do you have to scrape the old paint off it to re-paint it? If so, how do you get it out of all the crevices if it is textured to look like wood? Seems to me the maintainence aught to be the same as a wooden house.
Thanks
Frank
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frank... fibercement loves paint.. with the right primer ( we install factory primed).. and a 100% acrylic finish.. you should get 12 years..
in parts of texas they are offering lifetime warranties on teh paint finish...
this is so far superior to wood in terms of maintenance that you would not believe it...
but check it out .. it's all true...
*Frank,When I installed Hardieplank on my house about 4 years ago, they were offing a 20 year warranty on factory finished planks. (primed 2 sides, finish coat one side). That's 20 years on the finish, 50 years on the plank. It's also transferable to the next home owner.Eric
*As an engineer, I researched this topic before using Hardie Siding on my new house last year. I painted it with 100% acrylic primer followed by two coats of 100% acrylic topcoat. It's only been one winter and one summer, but it looks brand new. You should never see peeling on properly painted fiber cement, so it should never need to be scraped when repainting. Of course, it should be washed good to remove construction dirt before the first paint job. It's important to NOT use oil based paint on fiber cement siding. There are three reasons not to. 1. The manufacturer does not recommend it. (Possibly for the other reasons below.) 2. When fats and oils come into contact with alkali, a chemical reaction takes place turning them into soap. That's how they make soap -- lye and fat. Cement and paint oils will do the same thing, and the result is peeling. Quoting from Paint in America published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation: "Oil paints are attacked (saponified) by alkali. ... Today the recommended practice in painting fresh plaster or masonry is the application of an acrylic 'latex' primer or some other type of alkali-reisitant primer." 3. Latex paints are more durable than oil based paints. Quoting again from the book, "Resins used in [latex] generally have much higher molecular weights than resins used [in oil]. ... Because of the inherent chamical stability of good acrylic resins and because of the high molecular weight of emulsion resins, acrylic emulsion (acrylic latex) paints offer by far the highest degree of weather resistance of any type of paint in common use today on American buildings." He goes on to say this is not true when going over old, chalky paints. Of the three kinds of "latex" paints, he says that the 100% acrylic is the best: "The principal synthetic polymers that have been used in emulsion paints are of the acrylic, poly vinyl acetate, and styrene-butadiene classes (and combinations of these). The molecular structure of good acrylic resins renders them more resistant to oxidative degradation than styrene-butadiene and more resistant to water than poly vinyl acetates. They [acrylic] are generally considered the best class of emulsion paints for general architectural use." I can't answer authoritively about whether or not to skip the primer if the siding is preprimed. My personal preference would be to prime again. Call Hardie or a real paint authority if you want to be really sure. Good luck, the Hardie is an expensive but very nice product.
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I am considering "HardieBoard" for my new house. How well does paint hold up on it? Do you have to scrape the old paint off it to re-paint it? If so, how do you get it out of all the crevices if it is textured to look like wood? Seems to me the maintainence aught to be the same as a wooden house.
Thanks
Frank