Lynden Siding Cedar siding comes up a lot in conversations with Lynden homeowners, especially on older farmhouses and craftsman-style homes around Whatcom County where it was the standard for decades. It has a real, earned reputation: nothing looks quite like real wood grain, and a well-maintained cedar home has a warmth that manufactured products spend a lot of marketing money trying to imitate. We're not going to tell you cedar is a bad material. We're going to tell you why we, as a company that installs siding for a living in this specific climate, stopped putting it on homes.
What cedar gets right
Cedar is naturally rot-resistant compared to most other softwoods, thanks to oils in the wood that fight decay and insects. It takes stain and paint well, it's lightweight and easy to mill into different profiles, and it has a genuine, organic look that's hard to fake. If you strip away everything else, cedar's appeal comes down to one thing: it's real wood, and people can tell.
Where cedar struggles in this climate
The problem isn't cedar as a material in a lab. The problem is cedar as a material nailed to the outside of a house in Whatcom County, year after year, exposed to exactly the conditions that break wood siding down early.
- Moisture that never fully dries out. Lynden sits in a marine climate with long stretches of drizzle, driving rain off the fields, and a moss season that can run from fall through spring. Wood siding needs time to dry between wet cycles. When that drying window shrinks, moisture gets trapped in the grain, and that's when rot, cupping, and paint failure start.
- Moss and mildew are relentless here. North-facing walls, shaded elevations near trees, and anything close to grade will grow moss on cedar faster than most homeowners want to deal with. Moss holds moisture directly against the wood, which accelerates the exact decay cedar is supposed to resist.
- Salt-laden air adds another layer of stress. Homes closer to the water in Whatcom County deal with salt air that speeds up finish breakdown on any painted or stained surface, cedar included. That means more frequent refinishing to keep the protective coating intact.
- Maintenance is not optional, it's structural. Cedar siding needs to be re-stained or repainted on a real schedule, not a "whenever we get to it" schedule, because the finish is doing the work of keeping water out of the wood. Skip a cycle or two in a wet Pacific Northwest stretch and you're not just looking at faded color, you're looking at cupped boards, split ends, and soft spots that need to be cut out and replaced.
- Board replacement rarely matches. Wood weathers and grays unevenly. A replaced board next to twenty-year-old siding stands out for years until it weathers in, and stain colors are notoriously hard to match exactly on repairs.
Why this matters more than it seems like it should
None of this makes cedar a scam or a bad product. It means cedar siding puts a maintenance obligation on the homeowner that doesn't fit how most people actually live. Most homeowners don't want to be on a five-to-seven-year refinishing schedule with a ladder and a sprayer, especially in a county where the weather gives you a narrow dry window each summer to actually do that work. When that maintenance gets deferred, which it usually does, the siding degrades faster than the sales pitch implied, and repairs get more expensive than they needed to be.
As a contractor, we'd rather stand behind a product that performs well under the maintenance schedule people actually keep, not the one they intend to keep.
What we install instead
We install James Hardie fiber cement siding exclusively, and the reasons map almost point for point against cedar's weaknesses. Hardie's HZ5 product line is engineered specifically for climates with heavy moisture exposure, which describes Lynden's weather about as well as any spec sheet can. It's non-combustible, it doesn't feed moss and mildew the way organic wood fiber does, and it holds its shape and doesn't cup, crack, or split from repeated wet-dry cycling the way cedar can.
The ColorPlus factory finish is baked on under controlled conditions and backed by a real finish warranty, so you're not re-staining every few years to protect the substrate underneath. If a board ever needs replacing down the road, a ColorPlus match is a known quantity instead of a guessing game with stain pigments. And because it's not organic material, driving rain and salt-laden air don't create the same long-term decay risk that they do with wood.
Cedar can still be the right call for specific architectural goals, and plenty of good contractors install it well. We just don't, because we'd rather put a product on your home that holds up to Whatcom County's weather with less upkeep, not more.
Let's talk about your home specifically
Every house and every lot is different, and the right siding decision depends on your home's exposure, elevation, and how it currently looks. If you're weighing cedar against fiber cement, or just want an honest read on what's happening with your existing siding, we're happy to take a look. Reach out for a free, no-pressure estimate and we'll walk the property with you and tell you what we'd actually recommend.