Ferndale Siding Cedar Has Real Appeal — and Real Costs
Cedar siding has a well-earned reputation. It's a natural wood product with a warm, textured look that a lot of homeowners in Whatcom County still ask for by name. There's nothing wrong with wanting that look. The problem isn't the appearance — it's what it takes to keep that appearance, and keep the wall behind it dry, once the siding is actually up and living through a Ferndale winter.
We stopped installing cedar siding as a standard offering. Not because it's a bad material in the abstract, but because of what we consistently saw happen to it in this specific climate, and because we didn't want to keep selling homeowners a maintenance schedule most of them weren't signing up for.
What Cedar Does Well
- Natural insulating properties. Wood has decent thermal performance compared to some other traditional claddings.
- Repairable in sections. A damaged board can sometimes be replaced individually rather than requiring a wider tear-out.
- A look that's hard to fully replicate. Real wood grain has a depth that manufactured products try to imitate, with varying success.
Those are legitimate strengths. If cedar were installed in a dry inland climate and maintained on a strict schedule, a lot of the concerns below would matter less. That's not the climate we work in.
The Maintenance Truth: What Cedar Actually Requires Here
Ferndale sits close enough to the Strait of Georgia and Bellingham Bay that salt-laden air is a real factor on exterior materials, not a theoretical one. Combine that with Whatcom County's driving rain events off the Pacific and a moss season that can run from fall through spring on shaded or north-facing walls, and you have a climate that is genuinely tough on any wood-based cladding.
Cedar siding, to hold up here, needs a homeowner to stay on top of a recurring list of tasks:
- Re-staining or re-sealing every 2-4 years. Once the factory or applied finish starts to break down, moisture gets into the wood fibers directly, and cupping, splitting, or checking follows.
- Regular moss and mildew treatment. Our moss season isn't a minor inconvenience — it's a months-long condition on any shaded elevation, and moss holds moisture directly against the wood surface, which accelerates rot at the exact spots you can't always see from the ground.
- Caulk and joint inspection. Wood moves with moisture and temperature. Joints that were tight when installed can open up over a few seasons, and once water finds its way behind a board, it doesn't dry out quickly in our climate.
- Watching for insect activity. Untreated or under-maintained wood siding is more attractive to carpenter ants and other pests than fiber cement, especially where boards stay damp longer than they should.
- Prompt repair of any damaged boards. Cedar doesn't forgive neglect the way some materials do — a small area of failed finish left alone tends to spread.
None of that is a defect in the product. It's just what wood siding asks of a homeowner in a coastal Pacific Northwest climate. The honest question we ask every homeowner considering cedar is simple: are you planning to actually do that maintenance, on that schedule, for as long as you own the house? Most people, when they hear the real schedule out loud, say no.
Where This Goes Wrong in Practice
The failures we've seen on cedar siding almost never happen because the wood was a poor grade or the installer did sloppy work. They happen a few years in, when the re-staining schedule slips — often because it's expensive and disruptive to redo every couple of years — and moisture starts working into unprotected wood from the back side or through hairline checking on the face. By the time it's visible, there's often already moisture damage to the sheathing or framing behind it. That's a much more expensive problem than the siding itself.
As a company, we didn't want to keep being the crew that installs a beautiful cedar exterior, hands over a maintenance list, and then gets the call five or six years later when that schedule didn't get kept and there's water damage behind the wall. That's a bad outcome for the homeowner and it's not a position we wanted our name attached to.
Why We Install James Hardie Instead
James Hardie fiber cement is our standard for a direct reason: it removes the maintenance schedule that makes wood siding risky in our climate, without asking the homeowner to give up a finished, dimensional look. It's non-combustible, it's engineered specifically for wet climates through Hardie's HZ5 product line, and the ColorPlus factory finish is baked on and warrantied rather than applied on site and left to a re-staining calendar. It handles driving rain, salt air, and moss exposure without the recurring sealing and refinishing cedar demands, and it carries a strong transferable warranty when installed to Hardie's specification — which is the only way we install it.
We're not asking anyone to love fiber cement more than real wood on sight. We're asking homeowners to weigh what a product costs to own over 20-30 years in this specific climate, not just what it costs to install. That's the comparison that matters, and it's the one that led us to standardize on Hardie.
If you're weighing cedar, fiber cement, or another siding option for a home in Ferndale or elsewhere in Whatcom County, we're happy to walk your specific house and give you a straight, no-pressure estimate — including an honest read on what each option would actually require you to keep up with over time.