Replacing rotten weatherboards

[ozi]

Hi all,

I looked at a couple of weatherboard properties today which need some external maintenance. The weatherboards have a lot of water rot in areas and a large number of them would need to be replaced. On one of the properties, the owner has done a bit of a shonky job of bogging up the rot with filler and nicely re-painting over it.

Has anyone had any experience replacing weatherboards? Roughly how much would it cost to completely replace the weatherboards on an average sized property?

Due to the considerable amount of water rot, would you say its highly likely there would be termite infestation as well? Is there anything else I should be mindful of?

Thank you in advance.

Regards,
Ozi

 

[Lyne]

We bought an old weatherboard house in a Melbourne suburb in 2001 that we've been slowly renovating/extending doing all the work ourselves. It was built in 1948 and suffered from years of neglect. The house hadn't been painted for at least 25 years and was in a very sad state. The plan was to knock down the back of the house and built an extension. We started by fixing up the front of the house replacing windows and replacing/repairing weatherboards. Because the back was to be knock down we used the boards at the back that were usable. It is the typical layout with the old loo on one side and shed on the other, which had been covered at one point so the boards in these rooms were in perfect condition. So we had enough to fix the front. BIG job, lots of elbow grease but it came out fantastic. We did find allot of water infiltration around the windows and had to replace the studs and lintels, as it was all rotten. We then started getting quotes for the material required for the extension. We'd done the figures before using "Housing Products and Costing Guide", various price lists etc but what we didn't know initially (before doing the work at the front) was that the weatherboards they used when they build the house were no longer in production. In fact they were a type of baseboard that had been converted into weatherboard. We were stuck. The front was all fixed up (took us 14 days just for the prep) and there was no way we could use a different board for the extension without it looking "like an extension" if you know what I mean. It would have looked horrible.
So instead of costing us about +or- $3.00/linear meter for your regular bull nose boards we had to have them custom made for the "slightly" higher cost of almost $8.00/linear meter
Had we known this before we probably would have replace the boards on the entire house. It would have been much quicker and probably not much more expensive.
Looking back at it now I'm kinda glad we didn't know because we have a house that's a little different but at the time it was an extra expense that we hadn't planned for. So just make sure that what's on your house is readily available on the market today. It most likely is but just wanted to let you know what happened to us.

The only other place we've heard these boards were used was to build some of the military shacks at Point Nepean. So there you go we hold a piece of history!

 

[ozi]

Hi Lyne,

Thank you for the advice. I will need to check if the existing weatherboards can be found, but I'm pretty sure they are the standard bull nose boards which are quite common in the area.

Time to take some measurements and work out material costs now

Regards,
Ozi