Garden room cladding fixings
Most garden rooms feature timber cladding on the exterior, whether this is expensive Western Red Cedar or something a little more economical like Siberian Larch or Thermowood.
When fixing timber cladding, it is important that you use stainless steel fixings. If you don’t use stainless steel fixings, you will find that the fixing bleeds an ugly blue / black mark as the iron in the fixing reacts with the natural oils in the wood that make them durable; this will permanently stain your cladding, and these marks are not aesthetically pleasing.
We choose to use stainless steel external ring shank nails rather than wire nails. You can see from these photos that the shank of the nail has a series of ridges, each one gripping into the wood as its driven through. We can tell you they really do offer extra bite to the fixing and are damn hard to extract without damaging the board!
We choose to use 2.4mm x 51mm nails meaning that we achieve a firm fixing. We like to use a secret nailing technique when cladding, driving the nail through the tongue of the board. As you can see from our cross section, this offers a firm fixing through our 19mm board, the 25mm cladding batten.
We have created a cross section of a stainless steel nail being driven through the cladding board to create a secret nailing fixing
If you opt for face fixing your boards, you may want to consider a slightly shorter nail.
Stainless steel fixings cost quite a bit more than galvanised and bright zinc nails but are worth the investment as they will stand the test of time.
When you consider that cladding such as Western Red Cedar has a life expectancy of 30 years, investing in the right fixing today will be a good return on investment.