The exterior of your home is a homes armor and its beauty. Selecting an exterior is an important step if you build a new home or if you purchase a resale. Looks, maintenance, availability and cost come into play.

Charleston home exteriors are usually one of the following:

• Masonite
• Stucco
• Vinyl
• Wood
• Cement plank
• Brick (veneer, solid, front only)
• Block/masonry

Most buyers tend to gravitate first to brick but most end up with something other than brick. The advantage of brick is probably not as great as it once was in the marketplace - at least not in our area.

Because brick is not as readily available in Charleston (it has to be imported from the interior of the state) brick homes are more expensive to build than in some areas, such as Columbia. As a result, when you build a new brick home, you will pay slightly more - maybe 3% or so.

Brick homes in Charleston can be either solid brick, brick front, or brick veneer. Most brick homes today are either brick front or brick veneer (brick front being the more common situation in homes built in the last 10 years). Brick front and brick veneer have only some slight limited structural advantages, if any, over other building materials. The purpose of using brick today is for aesthetics and maintenance. Very few "solid brick" homes are built anywhere today. Once, they were common. The home fully covered with brick today is brick veneer. In brick veneer, the main structural strength of the exterior walls is wood - not brick. In solid brick homes of the distant past, the brick provided the main structural support.

Upon resale of these brick homes, buyers do tend to receive slightly more than for comparable non-brick homes - but I usually do not find that the difference is as much as the difference you see in the initial construction costs. The biggest reason for brick as a choice is the ease of maintenance and the nice, always new look, with resale coming in as a secondary consideration. The resale price itself may not be as much of an economic plus as the fact that many brick homes in Charleston will sell more quickly than their non-brick counterparts. Less time on market time saves the seller money. So in an indirect way maybe even more than a direct way, brick can have an economic advantage upon resale.

Today's more contemporary non-brick exterior building materials are much better than they have ever been before. New home construction using exterior materials such as a vinyl or concrete plank are popular and have their own advantages.

By far, the most common material in the Charleston area for homes that are under $500,000 is vinyl siding. There are many different brands with a great deal of variation in quality among them. The best vinyl siding is remarkably durable and looks quite nice. Vinyl exterior homes are easy to maintain, requiring an occasional power washing to restore their looks to brand-new. Choices now include premium darker colors such as barn red and mahogany along with the usual whites, light yellows, blues, and grays. Deeper-profile siding is now available that looks very much like wood. Some brands of vinyl now look so natural that you need to examine very closely to see that it is actually vinyl.

Concrete plank exteriors look very much like wood but are extremely durable, having been originally developed to handle beachfront conditions. A great material for the Charleston environment. Concrete plank exteriors, known commonly as Hardie Plank ( see: http://www.jameshardie.com/ ), will require occasional painting but not as frequently as a wood exterior will need to be painted. Many people like this material and it costs nearly as much as brick. One advantage with Hardie Plank is that you can repaint your home if you get tired of the color.

Wood exterior homes are still built as well in our area but not as often as they once were as the price of wood exteriors has risen dramatically. You will not find wood exteriors in large scale production built neighborhoods. While wood exteriors are not much less expensive than brick or concrete plank, wood exteriors require much more maintenance. As such, the long term cost of wood exteriors may actually end up being more that brick!

Stucco was once much more popular than it is today. Stucco can be "real" or "fake" (synthetic).  You can find stucco homes in Charleston but few are being built now. For authentic stucco, a cement mixture is applied to wooden walls which have been covered with tar paper and chicken wire or galvanized metal screening. Many homes built after the 1950s used a variety of synthetic materials which resemble stucco. Many of these homes built with synthetic stucco had moisture problems. Most of the problems were associated with EIFS (Exterior Insulation and Finish Systems). While true stucco is an excellent building material still today, the negative publicity from the problems with some synthetic stucco has reduced its popularity. Many people avoid using it (including builders) for fear of resale difficulty caused by negative perception  -- even if they like the many advantages of stucco and they like the look. It is just too risky for most.

Masonite was once a good material (when it was Georgia-Pacific siding) until changes in manufacturing resulted in a low quality material,  loosely-pressed and susceptible to extreme swelling and buckling. In 1994 a class action suit settlement stated that the anyone who owned property that had been constructed using or fitted with Masonite hardboard siding between January 1, 1980 and January 15, 1998 was entitled to reimbursement for any damage caused as a result of the faulty siding. Be very careful if considering a home build with this material as not all were repaired. The deadline for filing a claim has passed. Avoid this material.

Chris DeLoach