Lynden Exterior A Fair Look at LP SmartSide
LP SmartSide comes up in almost every siding conversation we have in Lynden, and for good reason. It's an engineered wood product — strand-based panels treated with a zinc borate process (LP calls it SmartGuard) to resist fungal decay and insects, then finished with resin-saturated surfaces meant to shed water better than old-style OSB siding ever did. It's lighter than fiber cement, easier for some crews to cut and nail, and it holds up well to impact — a real advantage if you've got kids, hail, or errant baseballs to worry about. LP backs it with a warranty that most homeowners find reasonable. None of that is in dispute.
Our company made a deliberate decision to install only James Hardie fiber cement siding, on every job, no exceptions. That's not a knock on LP SmartSide as a product — it's a statement about the standard we hold ourselves to as installers, and about what actually holds up long-term in this specific corner of Washington.
Why Wood-Based Siding Is a Harder Sell Here
Whatcom County sits in a genuinely tough spot for any wood product, engineered or not. Lynden gets driving, wind-blown rain off the Nooksack Valley for months at a stretch, and homes closer to Birch Bay and the Sound pick up salt-laden air on top of that. Add in the long, low-sun moss season that defines a Pacific Northwest winter, and you've got a climate that punishes any siding system where the core material is still, fundamentally, wood.
SmartGuard treatment resists rot better than untreated wood, but it doesn't change the physics of what happens at a cut edge, a butt joint, or a nail penetration. Every field cut exposes raw substrate that has to be sealed correctly, every time, or moisture finds its way in. That's a lot of quality-control points on a house with dozens of panels and hundreds of fasteners, and it's the kind of detail that's easy to get right on day one and easy to let slide on panel forty of forty.
The Maintenance Reality
SmartSide is a paint-grade product, not a factory-finished one in the way ColorPlus fiber cement is. That means:
- Field-applied paint or stain, which means the finish is only as good as the prep and the painter
- Recoating on a cycle — sooner in a climate with this much standing moisture and shade-driven moss growth than in a drier region
- Caulking at every joint and penetration that needs to be inspected and refreshed over the life of the siding
- Vigilance around sprinklers, gutters, and grade — anywhere water sits against the wall longer than it should
None of that makes SmartSide a bad product. It makes it a product that asks the homeowner to actively manage moisture exposure for as long as they own the house. In a lot of the country, that's a manageable ask. In a county that measures its winters in weeks of standing gray and moss on the north side of every roof, it's a heavier lift.
There's Also the Fire Question
LP SmartSide is a wood product. It's treated for decay and insects, not for combustibility, and it burns like the engineered wood it is. James Hardie fiber cement is made from cement, sand, and cellulose fibers — it does not support flame spread the way wood-based siding does. As wildfire smoke and dry-season fire risk have become a bigger part of the conversation across Washington, including inland from the coast, that difference matters more to homeowners than it used to.
Why We Standardized on James Hardie
Hardie fiber cement addresses the exact issues we just walked through. It's non-combustible. It's engineered in HZ product lines specifically for wet, moderate climates like ours, so it's built to handle sustained moisture exposure rather than just tolerate it. It comes with a factory-applied ColorPlus finish, baked on and warrantied against fading and peeling, which takes the "repaint on a schedule" burden off the table for a long time. And Hardie backs the product with a strong, transferable limited warranty that follows the house if you sell it.
We're not installers who carry six product lines and let the customer sort out the trade-offs. We picked one system, learned it inside and out, and trained our crews to install it to the manufacturer's spec — correct fastening, correct clearances, correct flashing details — because that's what actually determines how well any siding performs over twenty or thirty years in this climate. For us, that system is Hardie.
What This Means for Your Project
If you're comparing quotes and one contractor is proposing LP SmartSide, that doesn't mean you're getting bad advice — it's a legitimate product with real strengths, especially on budget-sensitive projects. We just don't install it ourselves, because we've built our business around one material we can stand behind completely, in Lynden's specific mix of rain, salt air, and moss.
If you'd like to talk through what fiber cement siding would look like on your home — cost, color options, or how it compares to what you have now — we're happy to come take a look. Reach out for a free, no-pressure estimate using the form below.