I was thinking I coulda just used Hardiboard, but...

...this stuff looks great! It's Cembonit, a cement board product like Minerit. Never needs to be painted. Heavy, but not too bad too install. (The manufacturer has an entire book worth of installation instructions/warnings/qualifications of the warranty, apparently owing to excessive heat retention issues. You are supposed to use a rainscreen application. We've only got a few pieces, and only one in the sun, so no rainscreen for us - don't tell anyone...) When we were designing the house, we talked about Cembonit in all the spaces between windows and sliders. But the tolerances were awfully tight in those spots (usually about six inch gaps). And on-site cutting is really messy and difficult, meaning we were looking at pre-ordering all the twenty or so pieces. And that seemed like a recipe for trouble. John at Res4 recommended using cedar panels in those spots, which turned out really well. (Harrison Hays was my contact at CBF.)

(***UPDATE: I see at CBF's site that they are no longer selling Cembonit and Minerit owing to supplier issues. We had about a twelve week lead req't for our order, and Harrison had told us that there were HUGE demand issues from European builders that was making it really hard to get product into the US. Guess it got to be too much of an issue...)

Install was pretty easy, though the pieces are heavy. They came crated:


Here's the first piece, with rubber furring strips and stainless steel fasteners from the manufacturer):




Also lots of rules about where and how frequently to install the fasteners; this pic is before I got all the fasteners on:


Second location, under the deck; you can see the hot water heater's intake/vent pipes in the top corner. Unfortunate location; I wasn't there when the HVAC guy did it, and we hadn't talked about it. I used my grinder to cut a notch out of this piece:








Res4 recommended the pinwheel application for the seams:





***UPDATE: Here's the initial estimate from CBF (invoice was identical):

MATERIALS

QUANTITY DESCRIPTION UNIT PRICE TOTAL

3.00 5/16" x 4' x 8' Cembonit 144.25 432.75

1.00 5/16" x 4' x 10' Cembonit 180.40 180.40

1.00 Rolls of 1 1/4" EPDM Rubber Strips 40.00 40.00

1.00 Rolls of 3" EPDM Rubber Strips 58.50 58.50

150.00 Stainless Steel screws for wood furring 0.30 45.00

204.00 Cutting Charges 0.60 122.40

1.00 Crate Charges 75.00 75.00

1.00 Freight Charges 314.49 314.49



Materials total: 1,268.54
*Freight Quotes are good for 2 weeks only