Best Cladding for Outdoor Walls: Pros, Cons, and Installation Tips
- Introduction
- What Can You Clad An Outside Wall With?
- Why Composite Cladding is a Great Choice for Exteriors
- Cladding panels give you new design options for your home and garden
- Exterior cladding protects your outdoor walls from the elements
- Outdoor wall cladding is easy to maintain and super durable
- Exterior wall cladding is a cost-effective way to renovate your home
- Homes with cladding are better insulated
- It’s easy to install outdoor wall cladding, even DIY
- Wall cladding can help to increase a home’s market value
- What’s the Best Cladding for Your Outdoor Walls?
- What Is The Cheapest Way To Cover Exterior Walls?
- Conclusion
- Why Tile Merchant?
Introduction
Cladding is a type of home renovation material used to adorn your indoor or outdoor walls. You may already have encountered popular types of indoor wall cladding like our noise-reducing acoustic panels or luxurious UV marble sheets, but what about the walls on the outside of your home?
Whether you're building from scratch, boosting curb appeal, or adding a stylish touch to your garden walls, choosing the right outdoor cladding is essential.
In this guide, we’ll explore the best materials for exterior wall cladding, weighing their pros and cons to help you find the ideal option—one that suits both your budget and your property’s long-term value.
Read on to discover the best cladding solutions for outdoor walls in Ireland today and beyond.
What Can You Clad An Outside Wall With?
There are a wide variety of materials you can use for exterior wall cladding. Popular types you might have seen adorning other houses in your neighbourhood include concrete, timber, masonry, fibre cement, metal, or PVC—the latter being what we use in our much-beloved exterior composite wall panelling.
What you choose to clad your walls with ultimately depends on what you’re looking for in a cladding.
Budget, aesthetics, temperature, exposure, and ease of installation should all factor into your decision-making process. For our money though, the best type of outdoor cladding you can buy is composite cladding panels made from durable, lightweight, affordable and weather-resistant PVC.
Why Composite Cladding is a Great Choice for Exteriors
Composite cladding panels, otherwise known as PVC panelling or waterproof cladding for outdoor walls, are made from recycled plastics, wood fibres and protective PVC layers.
Available in an attractive range of natural wood effects and neutral colours, there are a wide variety of benefits to cladding your outdoor walls with PVC panelling.
Let’s take a look.
Cladding panels give you new design options for your home and garden
Unlike concrete or metal, exterior panelling gives you a much wider range of design options when choosing how you want your home’s external walls to look.
From classic wood-effects with photorealistic quality—like oak, mahogany and teak—to neutral colours black, light-grey and blue-grey, slatted PVC wooden cladding for exterior walls creates an intriguing aesthetic.
The long vertical lines of the panelling, combined with a boutique wood grain and your choice of colour can help to make the exterior of your home the talk of the town!
Exterior cladding protects your outdoor walls from the elements
Ireland’s weather is notoriously unpredictable and often quite severe. When choosing the cladding for the outside of your home it’s important to factor in the weatherability and waterproofness of the material.
Thankfully, composite panelling is finished with highly durable wear layers which make the panels impervious to water, ice, wind and snow. Furthermore, composite cladding won’t warp, decay or split and is resistant to damage from wood-hungry insects like termites and woodlice.
They’re even UV-protected so that their colour won’t ever fade in sunlight.
Outdoor wall cladding is easy to maintain and super durable
Timber cladding has always been popular with homeowners since an all-wood exterior look is undeniably attractive.
The problem, however, is the degree of maintenance required to keep wood exteriors from rotting, fading, or falling apart altogether. Thankfully, the laborious task of sealing wood exteriors year-in, year-out is not something you’ll ever have to worry about with wood-effect panelling.
Once installed, composite panels tend not to need much maintenance at all—except for the odd clean with a power hose once in a while
DO YOU LIVE IN IRELAND? Order free samples of waterproof wall panels exterior today!
Exterior wall cladding is a cost-effective way to renovate your home
Compared to some of the other popular exterior wall cladding materials like timber or stone masonry, composite cladding panels offer Irish DIYers and certified installers a vastly less expensive way to cover and protect outdoor walls.
Homes with cladding are better insulated
Cladding isn’t just about protecting outdoor walls from the weather or creating a more appealing aesthetic. By installing outdoor wall cladding you also improve the interior life of your home.
For one, cladding adds an extra layer of insulation between you and the outdoor elements, helping to keep your home just that little bit warmer—which every Irish person knows is absolutely key when winter comes around!
It’s easy to install outdoor wall cladding, even DIY
One of the greatest unsung benefits of composite wood panelling for outdoor walls is how easy it is to install.
Unlike rendering exterior walls in cement, pebbledash, or hardwood—each of which requires the skilled hand of a professional—wood composite cladding can often be installed DIY.
Designed with innovative tongue-and-groove edges which make slotting the panels together a piece of cake, all the installer needs to do before covering their home’s exterior is to build a subframe onto which the panels can be glued
PRO TIP: we recommend a fast-setting outdoor glue like Bostik MSP 107 White Seal Bond.
Wall cladding can help to increase a home’s market value
Last but most certainly not least, we should mention that the market value of your home may also be positively affected by the installation of composite wood panelling on your exterior walls.
For the reasons listed above, as well as the gorgeous aesthetic of a slat panelled home, buyers are likely to cough up a little extra for a home with quality cladding.
What’s the Best Cladding for Your Outdoor Walls?
We’re a little biased when it comes to answering the question, what is the best exterior cladding for a home. Of course, we think it’s our composite wood panels. Ultimately though the decision should come down to what cladding option is best suited to your unique needs.
For example, if budget is the name of the game, then you may want to explore cheaper options like concrete or cement, whereas if budget is no constraint then you could opt for the more luxurious choice of real hardwood... provided you’re up to the maintenance!
If, however, what you’re really looking for is an affordable, durable, attractive and easily installable cladding solution built to last you for at least the next 15-20 years or more, then really you’ve only one option: exterior composite wall panelling.
What Is The Cheapest Way To Cover Exterior Walls?
As mentioned above, the cheapest exterior cladding solution tends to be cement rendering, since cement is a readily available and durable (if relatively ugly) material. Our sources suggest that cement rendering can cost as little as €50 per m2.
We’ve added a row to our table below to illustrate the difference in price of cement compared to our vastly more desirable wood composite exterior panelling.
How Much Does External Wall Cladding Cost?
On average, cladding your outdoor walls with wood composite materials like our gorgeous slat panelling will cost you just shy of €70/m2.
Let’s take a look at how this price works out across a range of average house sizes.
| Material | Terraced house (88m2) | Semi-detached house (97m2) | Detached house (149m2) | Bungalow house (77m2) |
| Oak panels | €6,160 | €6,790 | €10,430 | €5,390 |
| Grey panels | €6,160 | €6,790 | €10,430 | €5,390 |
| Teak panels | €6,160 | €6,790 | €10,430 | €5,390 |
| Walnut panels | €6,160 | €6,790 | €10,430 | €5,390 |
| Cement render | €4,400 | €4,850 | €7,450 | €3,850 |
Conclusion
Knowing how to clad an outside wall depends on you knowing what you want your house to look like, how well it needs to weather the climate conditions in your area, how much money you’ve got to work with and more.
There are lots of different exterior cladding materials available on market, from cheap but cheerless cement rendering to extravagant but demanding hardwood panels and everything in between.
For those homeowners—or business owners—looking for a happy medium between expensive and cheap, durable and desirable exterior cladding, you simply can’t do better than to choose Tile Merchant’s exterior composite wood wall panelling.
Browse our outdoor wall cladding range today and discover a solution capable of withstanding even the most severe weather conditions, whilst looking gorgeous all the while. Order a free cut sample today or order online now for fast and secure delivery, anywhere in Ireland.
Why Tile Merchant?
We offer extremely competitive pricing on our entire range of tiles and likewise. We stock a huge range of wall and floor tiles and our prices are competitive for retail and trade. Our stock is widely available in our tile stores in Ireland which are open 7 days a week.
Alternatively, if you’d prefer to shop our tiles online, we can supply you with samples delivered for free.
Article written by Calum
Cal Bannerman is a freelance writer, editor, podcaster and voice actor from the Scottish Borders. He runs the storytelling podcast "Stories from the Hearth" and lives in a wee Glasgow Flat with his partner and their cat".