Newmarket Roofers provides exterior cladding installation and repair for homeowners in Soham, helping you decide whether to repair existing cladding or replace it entirely.
Call any time. Calls are answered day and night and passed straight to our roofers.
Exterior cladding is fixed over your external walls to protect the structure from rain, frost, and wind while improving thermal performance and the appearance of the building. We fit timber, composite, and fibre cement boards on homes across Soham and the surrounding area, working from our base in Newmarket.
Installation involves fixing treated timber battens to the wall, creating a ventilated cavity, and then securing the chosen boards in horizontal or vertical runs. Window and door reveals are trimmed out, joints are sealed, and the finished surface is either pre-finished from the factory or painted on site depending on the material.
When cladding begins to fail, homeowners face a straightforward but often costly fork in the road: repair the sections that are causing the problem, or strip everything back and start again. The right answer depends on the cause of the failure, the age of the installation, and what the remaining boards look like.
A repair makes sense when the damage is genuinely isolated - a few boards cracked by an impact, a small area of rot confined to a single run, or a handful of failed fixings that have allowed boards to pull away. In these cases, replacing the affected boards and addressing the underlying cause costs far less than a full replacement and achieves the same result.
Replacement becomes the better option when the failure is widespread or when the root cause cannot be fixed without removing the whole installation. If moisture has been getting behind the boards for years, the battens underneath may be rotten even where the face of the cladding looks acceptable. Replacing boards on top of rotten battens is false economy - you will be doing the job again within a few years.
Poor original installation is the most common cause of premature failure. A missing or inadequate ventilation cavity is the most frequent problem - without air movement behind the boards, moisture condenses and has nowhere to go, leading to rot in timber boards and staining in composites. Inadequate fixings, either too few or made from the wrong material, allow boards to flex and crack over time.
Sealant failure at window and door reveals lets water track behind the boards at the very points where it does the most damage. Sealants have a finite lifespan and need to be checked periodically. On older installations, the sealant often fails long before the boards themselves deteriorate.
Untreated or under-treated timber is another regular culprit. Timber cladding needs to be maintained - oiled, stained, or painted on the correct cycle for the product used. When maintenance lapses, the wood dries and splits, fixings work loose, and water gets in.
Repairing a localised section of timber or composite cladding typically costs from around £200 to £800 depending on the number of boards affected and whether scaffold access is needed. Full replacement of exterior cladding on a standard semi-detached house generally runs from around £4,000 to £10,000 or more, depending on the material chosen, wall area, and site conditions.
Fibre cement replacement boards cost more per square metre than timber but require less ongoing maintenance, so the whole-life cost is often lower over ten to fifteen years. When weighing repair against replacement, consider not just the immediate cost but what you are likely to spend on maintenance and further repairs in the next five to ten years.
The honest assessment is this: if a contractor looks at your cladding and immediately recommends full replacement without checking the battens and the wall behind, ask them to justify the recommendation. Equally, if they propose patching a large area of visibly failing cladding without investigating the cause, you risk paying for a repair that fails again within a year or two.
A proper inspection involves removing at least one section of boarding to check the cavity and battens. It takes no more than thirty minutes and the information it gives you is essential for making the right call.
From our base in Newmarket we carry out cladding repairs and full installations across Soham, as well as nearby towns including Ely, Cambridge, and Bury St Edmunds. Call us to book a survey of your existing cladding so we can give you an honest assessment of whether repair or replacement is the right route for your property.
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Call any time. Calls are answered day and night and passed straight to our roofers.
