Steel siding or steel sheet wall cladding.

Once again a reader's question has stirred me up and got me to to expand a touch on my original E-Mail reply.
Here's the question that I have received from Mark W. who lives in Oklahoma city, but is planning to build in Belize.

Steel siding - A two storey house in a Marina development less than 1Km from the open sea.   The upper floor all steel construction and the ground floor reinforced concrete masonry.

Steel siding - Again masonry construction to ground level with lightweight steel frame and siding to upper floor. Note the generous use of awnings and eaves.

Hi Mark,
If I was in your shoes I wouldn't hesitate, I,d go for it. We are in the tropics, with at least three marina type developments and a few beachfront suburbs.  (Note, all the photos on this page were taken in close proximity to the sea, with the construction complying with cyclonic area building codes. i.e. terrain category 2.5 or category 3 ).

Most new houses being built in these areas are using metal cladding at least somewhere. 90% of the roofs and I'd guess 75% use some wall cladding.

Right on the beach are all the top class architect designed expensive houses, so they use a fair variety in walls and cladding, but steel is not seen as inferior. It is just cost effective compared to other alternatives. We don't seem to use Vinyl any more, discolours and goes brittle with age in the sun.

I did two, one million dollar units, a couple of years ago right on the beachfront and we explored the costing of using "Colorbond Ultra" which is supposed to be extra protection in harsh environments, but in the end we used the standard stuff.

Every now and again you see a house with rusty patches on the siding, but mostly that can be put down to bad fixers scratching the surface or using discs to cut it etc.

I quite like the plain unpainted galv. finish, easy to fix, hard to scratch.  Most seem to go for white or other feature colours.   Use good screws though, with the heavy coating.

When I get around to it I will be doing a large section on steel, and steelwork, including steel wall frames.  Got to be the way to go for you I guess.
Cheers
Bill

Steel siding - Colorbond off white corrugated wall sheeting.  Again note the generous overhangs to shade the walls.

Steel siding - Detail of wall finish on a multi storey hotel.  As Mark says, an industrial look, but to be fair, this one has large areas of masonry or concrete walling also that change the overall effect considerably.

The photo above is a detail showing plain, not coloured corrugated iron.  This shows only a small section of a fairly large building that is about 15 storeys high.  The whole building is not clad like this, it certainly would look industrial if it was, but the building has a mixture of masonry, concrete and corrugated, to give a visual effect.

All the houses in these photos here, in fact on this whole website where they are photos of recent work, are of buildings that comply to strict engineering standards and as such they can be expected to stand up to a cyclone (hurricane) event equally as good as a concrete bunker.

Apart from that though, they are also designed to comply with modern requirements for amenity, access and egress, energy efficiency etc.  This means that we are not allowed to build hot airless boxes any more.  or deathtraps in case of a fire.  We try to build houses that are good to live in, while still being strong enough.

Are we doing this?  I'll let you know after the next category five has been and gone :-)

I hope that these photos generally show that the humble corrugated iron, or other profile of steel siding can be successfully used on modern housing and not look too "industrial".

Steel siding - Detail of gable ends, one clad horizontally, which is by far the most common way, and the other is clad vertically to give architectural variety.

I always reduce my photos for the web, to try to make them load quickly, so a lot of detail gets lost, but you should be able to see here, not only the vertical and horizontal cladding on the gable ends, but the different screws fixing the roof sheeting and the wall cladding.

Another point of interest is the use of "Mini-Orb" for the lining of the overhang. This profile with it's smaller corrugations is quite expensive compared to the standard profile and it is used purely for architectural effect.

In general the same tradesmen use the same tools to fix the steel siding, as are used with the steel roofing. I will do a short page on fixing and the various flashing and trims used later.

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