Today your new Storybook home can absolutely be low maintenance (and fire resistant) utilising many of the available cladding products suitable for our lightweight architecture. These include a variety of cement fibre options that perfectly emulate the traditional weatherboard look or more modern profiles for contemporary designs. These products do not rot or shrink, and their inert nature and surface qualities provide a superior key for today’s long-lasting paints.
You’ll see many examples of Storybook designs using a combination of these products like render, simulated stone, Colourbond, natural timber cladding that patinas with age etc. Storybook homes come standard with double gazed timber windows but if you want to avoid painting, they look great too with low maintenance powder coated double glazed aluminium windows that come in a choice of colours. Storybook loves our fabulous Aussie product ‘Colourbond ‘roofing, the flexibility, the colours and the longevity.
The great thing about lightweight architecture is that the building can withstand a degree of flexing whereas brickwork will simply crack. If you walk around a dozen brick veneer homes ten years or elder, you’ll be surprised at just how many cracks you’ll encounter, usually due to ineffective expansion joints or a degree of foundation movement partly exacerbated by the sheer weight of the brickwork and tile roofing.
Many of the state of the art external paints of today boast ‘ lifetime ‘ guarantees or warranties on properly prepared new surfaces, which means presumably that you can choose the colours of your new Storybook home to match your imagination, paint it as directed and then throw away the paintbrush. Forget brick and tile, life will be better in a beautiful low maintenance custom Storybook dream home.