Whatcom County What LP SmartSide Actually Is
LP SmartSide is an engineered wood siding product — strand fibers bonded with resins and waxes, then treated with a zinc-borate preservative and coated with a resin-saturated overlay to resist moisture. It's a legitimate step up from old-style hardboard siding, which is exactly why so many Whatcom County homes from the 1990s and early 2000s ended up with it or its predecessors. It's lighter than fiber cement, easier on saw blades, and generally less expensive up front. For a lot of climates, installed and maintained correctly, it holds up reasonably well.
We don't install it. Not because it's a scam or a bad product on paper, but because after years of working on homes from Bellingham to Ferndale to Blaine, we've seen how engineered wood behaves once it meets our specific weather pattern — and we made a business decision to only stand behind one exterior system.
Why Our Climate Is the Deciding Factor
Whatcom County isn't a dry climate with the occasional rainstorm. It's salt air rolling in off Bellingham Bay and the Strait of Georgia, driving rain that comes in sideways for days at a time, and a moss season that can stretch from October well into spring on north-facing walls and anything shaded by evergreens. That combination is hard on any wood-based product, engineered or not.
LP SmartSide's whole performance case rests on its factory treatment and overlay staying intact and on every cut edge, seam, and fastener penetration being sealed correctly during installation. That's a reasonable ask on paper. In practice, on a job site in driving rain with a crew trying to hit a schedule, it's a lot of points of failure for a wood product whose core is still, fundamentally, wood fiber. Any gap in that sealing — a field cut that doesn't get primed, a nail set too deep, a caulk joint that fails after a few winters — gives moisture a path into the substrate. Once that happens, you're dealing with swelling, delamination at the edges, or soft spots, and by the time it's visible from the ground, the damage is usually already established.
Add moss and algae growth from our long wet, shaded seasons, and you've got a product that needs more attentive, ongoing maintenance than most homeowners realize they signed up for when they picked it partly for its lower upfront cost.
Where LP SmartSide Genuinely Falls Short for Us
- Edge and seam sensitivity: Cut edges must be field-treated with sealant every time, without exception. Miss one on a rainy install day and you've created a weak point that won't show up as a problem for a few years.
- Ongoing maintenance: It needs repainting on a schedule to keep the moisture barrier intact — not "when it looks like it needs it," but proactively, which is a hard sell for most homeowners once the newness wears off.
- Moisture is cumulative and hidden: Unlike a surface problem you can spot and patch, moisture intrusion into engineered wood often does its damage from the inside out, behind the paint film, before it's visible.
- Not non-combustible: It's treated for fire resistance, but it's still a wood-fiber product at its core, not a mineral-based material.
None of this means every LP SmartSide installation in the county is destined to fail — plenty are performing fine, especially where installation was meticulous and maintenance has been consistent. But we install exteriors we're willing to warranty and stand behind for decades, on homes that get real coastal weather every single year, and we didn't want our name on a product where the margin for installation error is that thin.
What We Install Instead, and Why
We install James Hardie fiber cement siding exclusively. It's a cement, sand, and cellulose fiber composite — non-combustible, dimensionally stable, and largely indifferent to the moisture cycling that gives wood-based products trouble. It doesn't rot, it doesn't feed moss and algae the way wood fiber can, and it isn't a fuel source the way engineered wood is.
Hardie's HZ5 product line is engineered specifically for cold, wet, freeze-prone climates like ours, and the factory-applied ColorPlus finish means the color and moisture barrier are baked on before the product ever reaches a job site — not dependent on a crew getting field-sealing and repainting schedules right for the next twenty years. It also carries a strong transferable warranty, which matters more here than in a lot of markets, given how many Whatcom County homes change hands over their lifespan.
None of that makes fiber cement zero-maintenance — every exterior needs periodic cleaning, caulk checks, and paint touch-ups over time. It just means the material itself isn't the weak link the way it can be with engineered wood in a climate this wet and this salty.
Making the Right Call for Your Home
If you already have LP SmartSide on your home and it's performing well, that's genuinely good news, and there's no reason to panic or rip it out early. But if you're planning new siding, a re-side, or you're seeing early signs of trouble — swelling at seams, soft spots, paint that keeps failing in the same spots — it's worth understanding the trade-offs before you commit to another wood-based product for another 20-plus years in this climate.
We're happy to walk your home, look at what you've currently got, and give you a straight, no-pressure estimate on what a James Hardie fiber cement system would look like for your property — no obligation, just an honest look at the options. Fill out the form below and we'll get in touch.