Exterior Wall Cladding Services VIC 2026 - Get Quotes

The Wall as a System

Owners shop for cladding and installers quote for cladding, and both are talking about the outermost twenty millimetres of something considerably deeper. Working from the outside in, a modern Victorian external wall runs cladding, then a drainage space in better systems, then a membrane, then the framing with insulation between the studs, then a vapour permeable or vapour resisting internal layer depending on the design, then the plasterboard. Each layer handles one job and none of them substitute for another. The board sheds the weather and the membrane stops what gets past it, and neither of them keeps the house warm. Insulation does that and does nothing at all about water.

That division of labour is the reason the material choice matters less than people think. Fibre cement, timber, metal, vinyl and rendered panel all shed water perfectly well when fixed correctly, and the differences between them are about appearance, maintenance and impact resistance rather than about keeping a house dry. What separates a wall that performs from one that does not is almost always a layer nobody can see. Two houses clad in the same board can behave completely differently over twenty years. What separates them was decided in a week nobody photographed.

Older Victorian walls are missing layers and that is worth establishing before anything is quoted. A pre-war weatherboard cottage may have nothing but building paper behind the boards, no cavity, no insulation and no flashings worth the name. A post war house might have insulation added in the ceiling and none in the walls. A 1990s house will usually have sarking of some kind, though frequently an impermeable foil that traps vapour rather than releasing it. Which of those you own decides what a reclad is actually worth doing. A house with no insulation and no flashings has far more to gain than one built in 2015.

Which brings up the single most useful idea on this page. A reclad is not really a cladding job, it is an opportunity to fix a wall that happens to require the cladding coming off. The access to the framing, the membrane, the insulation and the flashings is the expensive part, and it is already paid for once the boards are down. Spending it on boards alone and putting the wall back exactly as it was is the most common avoidable mistake in Victorian renovation. The house recladding page covers the sequencing in full.

Overcladding, meaning leaving the old wall on and building a new system over it, is the other route and it changes the layer question rather than removing it. The new build up has to sit outboard of whatever is already there, which means the drainage plane and the flashings move outward and the reveals at windows and doors get deeper. A sound existing wall whose membrane still works makes this a sensible saving on demolition and disposal alike. Where it does not, you have buried the problem. The wall panel installation page goes through that build up in detail.

Brick veneer sits outside all of this on the main walls and inside it everywhere else. Most of the Victorian middle ring has brick doing the cladding job at ground level, with the layer stack above only appearing at gable ends, dormers, upper additions and garages. Owners there are usually looking at a hundred square metres rather than three hundred. Masonry is dealt with on the brick cladding systems page, while those small elevations up high get their own treatment on the gable end cladding page. Access usually costs more than material on those jobs.

Direct Fixed, Drained Cavity and Rainscreen

Direct fixing means the cladding goes straight onto the frame or onto the membrane over it, with no deliberate gap behind. It is the cheapest arrangement, it is what most older Victorian houses have and it is entirely adequate on a sheltered elevation with good eaves and a competent flashing schedule. Direct fixing leaves no margin for error anywhere in the build up. Any water that gets past the board is against the membrane with nowhere to drain and no air movement to dry it, so the membrane has to be doing its job perfectly for as long as the wall stands. That is a lot to ask of a single layer over forty years.

A drained cavity puts the cladding on battens, typically eighteen to thirty five millimetres thick, fixed through to the studs. Anything that gets through tracks down the rear face and escapes at the bottom, while a current of air drawn in low and pushed out high removes the residue. Allow $28 to $65 per square metre covering the battens and their trims. On a southwestern elevation in Melbourne, which takes most of the weather for most of the year, that is the best value upgrade available on this page.

A rainscreen goes one step further and treats the cladding as a screen rather than a barrier. Joints are left open by design, water is expected to come through them, and the membrane behind is unambiguously the waterproofing layer. Architects reach for it constantly and it performs, so long as the layer behind is a product rated for that duty and drawn as the thing doing the waterproofing instead of tacked on afterwards. Open jointed work and the question of which layer stops water are covered on the architectural cladding page.

Whichever arrangement is used, the drainage path has to be continuous and it has to have an exit. Battens installed horizontally without drainage notches will dam water behind the cladding as effectively as a solid wall. A base closed off neatly for a cleaner line removes the exit entirely. Top and bottom openings want mesh fine enough to stop insects and coarse enough to pass air. Ask how water gets out and look for a finger on a drawing rather than a general assurance.

Cavity depth matters more in Victoria than in a drier climate for a reason nobody mentions in brochures. A shallow cavity of ten or twelve millimetres drains fine but moves very little air, and air movement is what dries a wall in a climate where the cladding stays damp for days at a time. Twenty millimetres or more is a meaningful improvement on an exposed wall. It also costs almost nothing extra at the batten stage, which puts it firmly in the category of decisions worth making while you can. Going from twelve millimetres to twenty five is a different batten, not a different job. Get the batten depth stated in the quote.

Membranes and Condensation

This is the layer Victoria cares about most and the one owners hear least about. A house in Melbourne runs heating for the best part of five months, and heated indoor air holds far more moisture than the cold air outside it. That moisture moves outward through the wall, because vapour travels from warm and wet toward cool and dry, and it keeps going until it meets a surface cold enough to condense on. In a wall with an impermeable membrane, that surface is the back of the membrane itself. Whatever collects there gets neither sun nor moving air, so it stays where it is, up against the timber and the batts.

A vapour permeable membrane solves it by doing two jobs at once. It sheds liquid water inward from the cladding, which is what a membrane has always done, and it lets vapour pass outward from the framing, which an old foil sarking does not. The distinction is a material property rather than an installation technique, so it is decided when the product is ordered. At $9 to $22 a square metre it is the single best value item in any external wall quote. Nothing else on the list delivers as much for as little.

National rules on managing condensation in external walls have been in force since 2019, and this state falls in the zones where they bite hardest. What that means on the ground is that a new or reclad wall should be getting a permeable membrane as a matter of course, and a quote offering reflective foil sarking for a heated house here is either working to an old specification or has not considered the question. Get the product named and ask for the figure that describes how readily vapour passes through it. A supplier or installer who works with these walls will answer with a product name. Anybody reaching for a brochure instead has not specified one of these before.

Installation detail matters as much as product choice and it is where most of the failures actually happen. Each overlap has to run the right way, so water sheds down the outside of the sheet below rather than into the seam, the membrane has to be continuous around corners and up to the roof, it has to be dressed into window and door openings rather than cut short at them, and each hole through it has to be closed off on the membrane itself, not out at the board. A bead on the outside face looks neat and lets go inside five years as it pulls back from its edges. The closure belongs on whichever layer is keeping weather out, which is behind the cladding rather than in front of it. Nobody can correct that later without taking cladding off.

Internal linings complete the picture and they are where a well meaning retrofit can go wrong. In a heating climate the outer layers should be more permeable than the inner ones, so vapour that enters the wall can keep going outward rather than being trapped. Adding a vapour barrier on the inside of the frame while leaving an impermeable sarking outside creates a sealed box with the insulation inside it. If somebody proposes plastic sheeting behind the plasterboard, ask how the wall dries. The answer should involve the outer membrane being more permeable than the inner one.

Mould is the symptom owners eventually see and by then the wall has been wet for years. Staining on the cold side of a wall, mould in a wardrobe on a southern elevation, or a persistent musty smell in a room with no visible leak are all worth taking seriously as a wall problem rather than a ventilation problem. Both can be true at once. Improving the ventilation helps and so does fixing the wall, and only one of those can be done while the cladding is off. Owners who install an extraction fan and leave the wall alone usually find the mould returns in the same spot.

Insulation and Comfort

Insulation is why most Victorian owners end up recladding in the first place, even when they describe the job as cladding. A wall with nothing in the stud cavity loses heat continuously through winter and gains it through a February afternoon, and on a pre-war weatherboard house the wall cavity is frequently empty. Filling it properly while the boards are off comes to $18 to $45 a square metre, according to the product and the depth of the cavity. Blowing insulation into a closed wall afterwards is possible and is a considerably poorer result, because nobody can see whether the cavity actually filled.

Product choice is less important than getting it installed without gaps. Glasswool and polyester batts sized correctly for the stud spacing, friction fitted so they touch the framing on all four sides and do not sag, will do everything an owner needs. A batt jammed into a cavity and left compressed loses much of its value, and one cut short at a nogging leaves a gap that behaves like a hole in the wall. Ask to see it before the membrane goes back on, because it takes two minutes to look and the opportunity does not return.

Thermal bridging is the part nobody mentions and it matters more on steel framed houses. Heat moves through a stud far more readily than through the insulation beside it, so a wall full of batts still loses heat in stripes at every frame member. Timber bridges much less than steel and both bridge more than the insulation between them. Adding a continuous insulating layer outboard of the framing, under the cladding, interrupts that path and is one of the genuinely effective things a reclad can do on a steel framed house. It also adds thickness, which pushes the window reveals out and has to be drawn rather than discovered.

Air sealing is the cheapest comfort improvement in the whole exercise and it gets done almost by accident. Gaps around window frames, at the bottom plate, at penetrations and where services pass through the frame let air move in and out of the wall, which carries heat with it and undermines the insulation regardless of how well it was fitted. With the cladding off, all of that is reachable with a can of sealant and an afternoon. The improvement in comfort is disproportionate to the cost, and no owner ever gets a second chance at it.

Insulation and condensation interact in a way worth understanding before the work is specified. Pack the cavity and the rear of the board runs colder through winter, since there is less escaping warmth reaching it, and the place where vapour turns to water shifts outward accordingly. That is an argument for doing the membrane and the insulation together rather than an argument against insulating. Doing one and not the other is how a careful retrofit ends up with mould behind new batts. Products and their rated values are set out on the wall and ceiling insulation page.

Flashings, Openings and Penetrations

Walls do not leak through the middle of a board, they leak at the holes cut in them. Every window, every door, every penetration and every junction where one material meets another is a break in the drainage plane, and a flashing is what carries water across that break and back out to the face. On a house with six windows, two doors and the usual collection of taps and outlets, there are dozens of these. A quote with no flashing line has either absorbed the cost or is planning to improvise. Improvised flashings account for the great majority of wall leaks in this state.

Head flashings above openings do the most work and are the most commonly missed. Water running down the wall above a window has to be intercepted and thrown clear of the frame, which means a flashing that extends past the frame on both sides, turns up behind the membrane and has a drip edge at the front. A flashing that stops level with the frame lets water track around the end of it and straight into the framing at the corner of the opening. Rot turns up at that corner on the majority of reclad jobs.

Sill and jamb detailing matters just as much and is easier to get right. The sill needs to fall outward so water leaves rather than pools, the corners need sealing where the membrane is dressed into the opening, and the jamb flashing has to lap the correct way relative to both the head and the sill. Getting the lap order wrong is an easy mistake and an invisible one. Ask whoever is doing the work to describe the order the flashings go in, because anybody who has done it will describe it without hesitating.

Deck ledgers deserve their own warning because they cause more damage in Victoria than any other single detail. A deck bolted to a wall through the cladding, with no flashing behind the ledger, collects water at the top edge of the timber and holds it against the framing indefinitely. The result is rot in the bottom plate and the studs behind, discovered years later when somebody recladds. If a deck is coming off as part of the work, the flashing behind it is not optional. Structural repairs covers what happens when that detail has been missing for a decade.

Penetrations multiply on contemporary houses and each is a small hole that has to be sealed at the right layer. Garden taps, light fittings, outlets, refrigerant lines, fan discharges, meter boxes and conduit all come through the wall, and every one wants a collar or a sleeve sealed onto the membrane. Coordinating the services before the cladding goes on, so penetrations land in sensible places rather than the middle of a sheet, is worth the conversation nobody usually has. It also stops somebody drilling a new hole through a finished wall in month three.

Ground Clearance, the Base of the Wall and Termites

The bottom of a wall is where the most avoidable damage in Victoria happens and the fix is usually a shovel rather than a tradesperson. Boards want a gap above whatever the finished ground turns out to be, since anything sitting in soil draws water up into itself without stopping and nothing made for a wall is meant to be buried. The builder set that gap correctly and years of garden work have covered it up on a very large share of properties here. Cutting the paving back or digging the bed down puts it back.

On timber framed houses the clearance does a second job that matters more than the first. Termite management under the Australian standard depends on somebody being able to see the lowest part of the wall, so activity gets noticed on its way in rather than after. Cladding carried down into soil or behind a raised paver gives termites a concealed route straight into the framing and removes the ability to spot it. A builder or inspector will raise this immediately and an owner who has just built a lovely garden bed against the house will not have thought of it.

Termite risk is real across Victoria without being the constant preoccupation it is further north. It concentrates in the warmer and more humid parts of the state and around properties with timber in ground contact, stored firewood against a wall or a persistently damp subfloor. The cheap protections are all environmental rather than chemical: keep the bottom course clear of soil, keep the subfloor ventilated, stack firewood away from the house and fix the leak that is keeping a patch of ground wet. None of that costs anything and all of it helps. A timber framed house in the Yarra Valley benefits more from those four habits than from any chemical treatment.

Base flashings and closers finish the detail at the bottom of a drained wall. You want a gap at the bottom that lets water drain and air in, meshed against vermin, plus a starter trim holding the boards clear of the ground and giving a tidy line. Closing the base off solidly for appearance defeats the cavity entirely, which is a common and expensive error. The cladding repairs page covers what fails when it has been done that way for fifteen years. Reopening a sealed base after the fact means cutting the bottom course off a finished wall.

Subfloor ventilation ties into the same question on the many Victorian houses built over a crawl space. Vents blocked by garden beds, paving, decking or a later extension leave damp air sitting under the floor, which raises the moisture content in the bearers, joists and the bottom of the wall framing. Pulling the soil and mulch away from them costs nothing but an hour. Where the subfloor has been damp for years, rising damp assessment is the right first step rather than a cladding contractor.

Choosing the Material Once the Stack Is Settled

With the layers decided, the material becomes a question about appearance, maintenance and impact rather than about performance. Fibre cement is the Victorian default and deserves to be, since it is dimensionally stable through the seasonal swing, non combustible, of no interest to termites and it holds paint better than timber because the board does not move under the film. It comes in weatherboard profiles that satisfy most streetscapes and flat sheet for contemporary work. The fibre cement cladding page covers the profiles and the dust controls that cutting it requires.

Where a house is already timber and somebody intends to look after it, timber is the answer. Boards match an existing profile, individual lengths remain replaceable indefinitely, and a well kept painted hardwood wall in Melbourne lasts generations. The cost is a recurring one rather than an upfront one, because the coating is the only thing standing between the board and the weather, and a ten year repaint that quietly becomes an eighteen year one is precisely how good walls go bad. Character overlays across the older suburbs sometimes make it the only option. Matching and fitting sit on the timber cladding fitting page.

Vinyl occupies a smaller niche here than in colder countries but it earns a place on some houses. No repainting ever, it sits loose enough on its fasteners to move without splitting, and it dresses a tired wall for very little. On the other side, cold makes it more fragile than a warm climate would, so a Ballarat July is harder on it than a Geelong one, and finding a panel to match faded stock years on is close to hopeless. Most of the work is in the trims and mounting blocks rather than the panels, and that is where a careless job shows itself. Where it suits and where it does not is set out on the vinyl cladding installation page.

Metal gives crisp lines, a coating applied in a factory that will not need a brush for decades, and almost no load on the frame, which makes it useful over an existing storey. The thing it cannot absorb is impact, because nothing fills a dent in a flat panel convincingly and the mark carries thirty metres. Fixings have to suit the exposure within reach of the bay. The aluminium cladding page covers systems, finishes and the compatibility questions that mixed metals raise. Dents are the honest drawback and no filler hides one convincingly.

Insulated panel systems combine the cladding and part of the insulation in one product and they change the layer conversation rather than simplifying it. Where a panel provides the insulation, the framing behind it may carry none, which alters both the condensation calculation and the fixing schedule. These systems work when specified and installed as systems, with the manufacturer's documentation and fixing schedule in hand, and they fail when treated as ordinary sheet. The insulated wall panels page deals with the documentation to request and how the panels are fixed.

Mixing two or three materials on one house is normal on contemporary Victorian work and the junctions between them are the whole risk. Sheet low and metal high, a timber entry element, a rendered street face with boards down the sides, all of it works as long as somebody has drawn each changeover showing where the water goes and how the two materials finish against one another. Those junctions account for practically every facade leak here. Ask to see the junction details rather than the elevation, because the elevation always looks resolved.

Wind Classification and Fixing

Cladding is held on against wind rather than gravity, and how hard the wind pulls is a site specific number rather than a general one. Victorian sites are classified on a scale that accounts for the regional wind speed, the terrain, how sheltered the site is and the topography around it, and most of the state falls in the lower to middle part of that range. That classification sets the fastener type, the spacing and whether the corners and edges of the wall need a tighter schedule than the middle of it. The figure comes from the engineer or the surveyor rather than from whatever an installer usually does.

The corners and the top edge take a harder pull than the body of the wall, and on a small job that is the part most often overlooked. Wind flowing around a building accelerates at the corners and lifts at the top edge, so the fixing schedule usually calls for closer centres in those zones. An installer working to a single spacing across the whole elevation has priced the easy part of the wall. Ask whether the schedule tightens at the corners and expect a spacing rather than a nod. Ask whether the schedule varies at the corners.

Exposed sites change the answer noticeably and Victoria has plenty of them. A ridge top in the Dandenongs or the Macedon Ranges, an open paddock in the Wimmera, or a block fronting open water will rate above a suburban lot in Bentleigh with neighbours on three sides. Same board, same builder, different fixing schedule. A quote that never mentions the classification has priced a suburban wall wherever it happens to be going.

Fastener specification does the rest of the work and it is cheap to get right. The fastener has to suit both the load and the exposure, which means the right gauge and length for the schedule and the right material for the environment, and on anything within reach of salt air that means stainless or a heavily coated product rather than plain galvanised. Mixing metals is the other trap, since a plain steel screw in an aluminium panel or a galvanised fastener against certain treated timbers will corrode. Systems supplied with their own fasteners have answered the question already. Substituting a cheaper screw into a proprietary system is also how a warranty gets declined years later.

Battens introduce a fixing question of their own that gets overlooked on overclad jobs. Where cladding is fixed to battens rather than directly to studs, the battens themselves have to be fixed back to the studs at a spacing that carries the load, and the fastener has to be long enough to reach through the batten, the membrane and any existing cladding into solid timber. An installer screwing battens into old weatherboards rather than through to the framing has created a decorative wall. This is a genuine failure mode on cheap overclad work.

Compliance and Who Signs Off

Cross $10,000 on residential work here and you need the major domestic building contract with a registered builder behind it; cross $16,000 and that builder owes you an insurance certificate before any payment. Anybody can search the register, and because it prints the class beside the name it also settles whether their registration extends to what is being priced. Under those figures a carpenter operates on their own trade terms. The whole check takes about a minute at a keyboard.

A building permit is usually required where a reclad involves structural work, a change to the building fabric beyond like for like replacement, or work in a bushfire prone area. Replacing cladding with the same material in the same position frequently does not need one, and adding a new build up that changes the external wall system frequently does. Your building surveyor is the person who decides, and asking them early is free. Getting that wrong in either direction is how a permit request arrives after the scaffold does.

What was supplied and how it was built are both covered by Australian Consumer Law guarantees, run nationally through the ACCC and locally by Consumer Affairs Victoria, and nothing about registration changes whether they apply. This state additionally fixes warranty periods for residential work, with a longer window where the defect counts as structural. Water coming in because nobody flashed an opening and paint fading in year four fall on opposite sides of that line. Which side yours lands on determines how long you have to bring it up. Hang on to the contract and every invoice, because without them there is nothing to bring.

There is a set path for disagreements and a tribunal sits at the end of it, not the start. Write to the builder, take it from there to Domestic Building Dispute Resolution Victoria where conciliators can issue orders that bind, and only if that comes to nothing does VCAT hear it. These cases are won or lost on evidence of layers that nobody can inspect any more. A dozen photographs of the membrane, the flashings, the insulation and the framing before the cladding went on is the whole preparation required, and it costs nothing.

Two duties overseen by WorkSafe Victoria turn up on every reclad. Work above single storey needs a working platform and proper fall protection rather than ladders and optimism, which is why scaffold is a real line in a two storey quote rather than padding. And where a house was built or clad before 1990, the material coming off counts as asbestos bearing until a laboratory says otherwise, a process the asbestos testing and inspection page sets out along with what licensed removal involves. Results come back inside a week and cost nothing to plan around. Left until the scaffold is standing, it costs a great deal more.

Bushfire attack level and heritage overlays are the two planning constraints that change what may go on the wall. Ratings through the ranges and the peri urban fringe restrict the material and, at the higher levels, restrict gaps in the envelope in a way that sits awkwardly with an open jointed or heavily vented cavity. Guidance on what those construction requirements involve comes from the Country Fire Authority. Controls for heritage or neighbourhood character can dictate material and profile where a wall faces the street, and the council will answer that quicker than any contractor. The state planning portal also lists every control sitting over a title.

Around Victoria

Melbourne itself splits into two quite different jobs depending on where you are. Close in you get tight blocks, rear lanes, a neighbour a metre off the fence line and heritage rules out front, so getting to the wall drives the price and the planning scheme drives the material. The middle and outer ring is mostly brick veneer, which confines cladding to gables, upper additions and garages, and the newer growth corridors are lightweight cladding from the ground up with reactive clay underneath. Somebody who handles one of those three well can be quite wrong for another.

The bayside suburbs, the Peninsula, the Bellarine and the Surf Coast concentrate the exposure questions into a narrow band. Close to the water both the fastener metal and the coating grade start to matter, and the wind rating typically comes in above an equivalent block inland. A kilometre back the salt question largely disappears while the wind exposure often does not, which is why the two get considered separately rather than together. Local installers know where each line sits on their own patch.

Ballarat, Ballan, Trentham, Daylesford, Bendigo and the goldfields run the widest annual temperature range in the state and that shows up in the joints. Winter frosts followed by high thirties in February work a wall harder than any coastal climate, so the movement gaps on sheet and metal want working out rather than assuming. Heating runs longer and harder up there too, which makes the membrane and the insulation decisions matter more, not less. A house in Trentham has a stronger case for a permeable membrane than a house in Brighton.

Through the Dandenongs, the Macedon Ranges, the Yarra Valley and the Otways the bushfire rating governs the palette and should be established before anything else. A rating falls out of what grows nearby, how the land tilts and the distance between the two; it governs new construction and not the past, and stripping a wall and reclothing it counts as new construction. At the higher ratings the approved systems narrow considerably and the restriction on gaps in the envelope constrains ventilated cavities. Put the rating in front of the building surveyor and get a ruling before anybody picks a product. Designing a scheme first and testing it against the rating afterwards means designing it twice.

Out through Geelong, Gippsland, the Western District and along the Murray the constraint is availability rather than technique. Complete wall build ups have fewer specialists once you leave the metropolitan area, waits get longer, and anybody coming out from the city adds mileage and a bed for the night to the figure. A call to the nearest trade before the capital can remove both the travel charge and the wait. Where nobody local does the work, gathering enough of it into one visit to justify the travel prices better than calling somebody out for a single elevation.

Costs in Detail

Starting with the invisible layers, because they are the ones worth understanding. A vapour permeable membrane is $9 to $22 a square metre supplied and fitted. Cavity battens with their trims add $28 to $65. Stud cavity insulation runs $18 to $45 depending on product and depth. Flashings at openings run $38 to $95 a metre, and on an elevation with several windows that is a larger number than it looks.

For the visible material, reckon $75 to $155 a square metre in fibre cement, $105 to $205 for timber, $95 to $180 in vinyl and $160 to $340 for metal or aluminium systems, none of that including paint where paint applies. Allow another $35 to $75 per square metre on top for a two coat system over unpainted board. The whole arrangement from demolition to final coat, membrane and battens and batts and flashings and boards and paint all counted, lands between $240 and $520 a square metre. That figure is the honest one to compare quotes against.

Framing repairs are the line nobody can price in advance and the one that causes the most argument. Nobody knows what is behind an old wall until it is open, so the correct way to handle it is a rate per metre of bottom plate or per stud replaced, agreed before work starts, rather than a lump sum guess or an awkward conversation on day three. Get that rate written into the quote. A contractor who has stripped a few houses of that age will offer one unprompted.

Neither getting up there nor taking rubbish away is inside any of those rates. Expect $900 to $4,500 for scaffold according to the wall and the time it stands, and understand that above one storey it is a requirement rather than a choice. Clearing ordinary demolition waste comes to $400 to $1,600, a good deal more once licensed asbestos material is in the load, since that has to reach nominated facilities under a tracking system. Distance alone pushes that figure up on a country job.

There are two savings here that need arranging rather than wishing for. One scaffold hire spread across the boards, the upper windows, the fascia, the roof plumbing and the high painting costs a fraction of putting it up five separate times, and on two storeys that is generally the biggest number you can recover. And doing the membrane, the insulation, the air sealing and the flashings in the same visit as the cladding costs a few thousand rather than the price of a second strip out. Both need the programme aligned in advance.

What to Look Out For

Nothing signals trouble on an external wall quote faster than a rate per square metre of boards with nothing else attached. The membrane, the battens, the insulation, the flashing schedule, the fastener specification and the framing contingency are all real costs and all invisible once the wall is closed, so a quote listing only boards is either going to grow or is leaving them out. Put the missing items to whoever wrote it and the price usually moves. Should the figure hold firm, you now know what the low price omitted. Either result is worth the two minutes the question takes.

Watch for silence on the membrane, or a proposal to reuse whatever is already there. A reflective foil sarking on a heated Victorian house traps vapour in the wall, and an existing membrane that has been behind cladding for thirty years is not a component anybody should be planning to leave in place. Have them name the product and quote its vapour permeance. Where a contractor can supply neither, you have found out something useful about them.

Be careful with a head flashing that stops level with the window frame. Water running down the wall above needs intercepting and throwing clear past the frame on both sides, and a flashing cut to the frame width lets water track around the end and into the framing at the corner. That corner is where rot is found on nearly every reclad of an older house. It costs nothing extra to do it properly and it is not something you can inspect later.

Walk the base of the wall yourself before anybody prices anything. Cladding buried in soil, paving or a garden bed wicks moisture upward permanently and, on a timber framed house, hides the inspection zone termite management depends on. Correcting the ground level is the cheapest item in the whole exercise and the most commonly skipped. Anybody who has not walked right around the house looking at ground levels has not properly looked at it.

Finally, be wary of battens screwed to old cladding rather than through to the studs on an overclad job. The battens carry the whole wind load on the new wall, so fasteners that stop in a century old weatherboard have produced a decorative surface rather than a structural one. Ask what the battens are fixed into and how long the fasteners are. Somebody who has done this properly will answer with a length and a spacing. An assurance that it will be screwed back solidly is not a specification.

How to Get Comparable Quotes

Lead with the wall rather than with a product. Give the approximate build date, what covers it now, whether you believe there is anything in the cavity, which faces of the house are included and what outcome you are after. Hand over what you have already noticed, the corner that never dries out, the mark under one window, the deck somebody bolted on afterwards, because trouble in plain view gets costed as labour while trouble kept quiet gets costed as exposure. Saying it at the first visit is the least expensive advantage an owner has.

Then put the identical list to each contractor. Which membrane and its permeance, whether the wall is direct fixed or battened and at what cavity depth, the insulation product and value, the flashing schedule including head, sill and jamb, how penetrations are sealed and at which layer, the fastener specification and the wind classification it answers, the framing contingency rate, ground clearance at the base, access, waste, paint scope and warranties. Asking in the same words each time is what gives the difference between their numbers any meaning. Get it on paper ahead of the first visit rather than inventing it three times over. Ten minutes of preparation comes back many times.

Ask each of them what they expect to find once the boards come off. Somebody who has recladded houses of that era will name the likely trouble spots, usually the bottom plate on the weather side, the corners under windows and wherever a deck or a pergola was attached. A contractor who expects to find nothing has either not worked on old Victorian houses or is not saying. That answer tells you more about their experience than a list of completed addresses.

Set the build ups side by side and arrive at the totals last. Two contractors who have both signed up to the same membrane, the same gap, the same batts, the same flashings and the same per metre allowance are competing honestly, and the distance between them tells you something real. One that comes in under the others by precisely the membrane, the battens and the batts has priced a different wall, and the sections above describe how that wall performs in its third winter. Hand the missing items back to whoever wrote that quote and see whether it holds. If the figure holds, you now know what was left out of it.

Photograph everything before it disappears and keep the file somewhere permanent. The membrane with its laps, the flashings at every opening, the insulation in place, the framing where it was repaired, and a note of the products used with their specifications. A completed wall gives up none of its secrets to inspection, which makes those photographs the sole surviving account of how it went together. Somebody inspecting the house before a sale takes a folder like that as proof of care, and it ends a warranty argument before it starts. Walls with a paper trail also change hands more easily than walls without one.