Wooden house: wooden facade vs. plastered facade (wood fiberboard)

Good morning everyone,

Yesterday we visited the first company regarding our house planning.

It is supposed to be a timber frame house.

The company offers two versions of the facade: wooden facade (in several designs) or plastered facade.

The (normal, not luxurious) wooden facade costs about €40 more per sqm. Thus, we come to an additional cost of about €7000 for our (so far very rough) planned house.

We would actually be more in favor of an untreated wooden facade instead of a plastered facade.
For the following reasons:
- We like the look.
- With a good roof overhang I don’t have to do anything to the facade for the next approx. 60 years, so it will basically outlast me. (Look doesn’t bother me)
- maximum natural (ecological) material (German larch)

Now we are considering whether it is the right decision after all. The following aspects regarding this:

- How maintenance-intensive is the plastered facade? It is worked with a reinforcing mesh. Can I assume that apart from repainting every 10 - 15 years (which will be done by ourselves) there is nothing else to do? Or can cracks occur? I cannot assess the use of plaster on wood fiber boards.
- One often hears about algae-covered facades on well-insulated houses. Does this usually only affect houses insulated with plastic or also the planned house here? Only mineral paint (preferably KEIM or Sto) would be used.
- How much more ecologically sensible is the wooden facade really? The material is natural, but the material demand is clearly higher than with a plastered facade.

Maybe someone can give some suggestions on these considerations or share how they decided and why.

We don’t necessarily want a wooden facade, but would find it a bit nicer and see the advantages mentioned above in the points important to us (look, ecology, little/no maintenance). The question is whether all these points correspond to reality.

What we also considered. To make a mix. Wooden facade under the roof and plastered facade on the ground floor. Are there disadvantages here?

I look forward to your answers.

Regards Specki

We decided on a pre-weathered wooden façade for our timber frame (see profile picture), here is our decision process, maybe it will help a bit:

The plaster carrier board from our supplier is made of polystyrene (Styrofoam). Even though the board is much thinner than the polystyrene blocks with which many houses are plastered today, we did not want that on the house. Additionally, there are plenty of biocides in the paint to prevent algae growth. Essentially, wood remained (unfortunately only spruce, rhombus profile). We had seen nice wooden façades in Austria and southern Germany, so we were open to that. Painted opaque eventually means repainting and you no longer see the wood grain, untreated leads to very different color variations (especially with a larger roof overhang, my wife doesn't like that), so we eventually settled on pre-weathering. This also contains biocides, but I didn't know that at the time.

If I had built with an architect and really had free choice, then for wood it would have been a (real) Siberian larch and a different weathering glaze (probably water gray, the chosen shade is a bit too dark and uniform for my taste). If I could decide again, I would also have a partial façade visualized in plaster (plaster below, wood above), because meanwhile I have seen some nice variations and it would have loosened up the 2 floors + gable roof a bit, carrier board or not.

Ecology is a difficult topic for me when it comes to a resource guzzler like house construction. We did make some decisions for environmental reasons (no pellet heating, no fireplace, no polystyrene...), but with the house façade, appearance and practicality were the priority.

Thank you for your experience.

Ecology and practicability (maintenance friendliness and durability) are the most important things for us in this case.

We like the look of wood a little better than plaster, but we are flexible on that. That’s why we place strong emphasis on the other two points. If I have to repaint a plaster facade every 10 years, get algae on it, and have to completely renew the plaster after 20-30 years, then that wouldn’t be our favorite. But if I only have to repaint every 15 years and the plaster otherwise lasts the next 50-60 years, then that’s okay.

And yes, I fear the question, "which facade is more ecological?" is probably difficult to answer. But maybe someone has something to say about that.
We do not value "eco-appearances." So just a wooden facade to make it look ecological... that is not sensible.

Looking forward to further suggestions/comments.

Best regards
Specki

How is the location of the house? Directly by the forest? Then I would be careful with plaster, a lot flies over and the plaster gets dirty faster. "Normal" residential area... plaster is completely unproblematic there. After 10 years no one repaints, 15 years is more realistic, sometimes even longer.

Algae problems are not related to plaster, you have them on clinker just the same (just less noticeable). For algae, it also doesn't matter whether aerated concrete, polystyrene, wood or red wool hearts were used for the insulation, the effect is the same, it insulates... no contact to the outside air is present. In my opinion, however, generally a pretty overrated topic, I don't know a single house in this region that has problems with algae, regardless of whether plaster or clinker, polystyrene or mineral wool. Of course, you can find a few examples on the internet (but what can't you find...), but apart from a small part of the insulation conspiracy theorists.

In the end, I would decide on what you like better visually. The grayish facades are quite polarizing, you either like them or you don’t.

As I said, visually we tend to prefer the wooden facade. But it is actually not worth 7,000,- to us. We could just as well live with a plaster facade. So far, however, the wooden facade had the advantages: - No maintenance required and more durable compared to the plaster facade - More ecological Now we want to verify these two advantages again, to see if we might be on the "wrong track". Once we have that, we can decide if the extra cost is worth it to us.

Perhaps as an addition: When we discussed which type of wood facade we wanted to treat in which way, we clicked through a lot of the specialist blogs from the Swiss timber builders Renggli, because there is, among other things, a lot of visual material on weathering after certain periods (larch after 1, 3, 9, and 10 years) and many other well-founded pieces of information.

With completely naturally weathered facades, I had concerns that unfavorably weathered parts could become completely or patchily black, while, for example, parts under the eaves hardly change.