Like Mrs B, our house is more than a year old and the render is perfect. No cleaning so far, except a splotch of bird poo
but I'd have still had to deal with that on bricks. If I get sick of the colour, I'll paint it. I was pretty sick of the bricks on our old house after 22 years...
In the past I saw a lot of light-coloured rendered houses a few years old that looked like they need a good scrub. Stains from water running down the render, rusty marks and so on. I suspect that poor design or not so good workmanship on the spouting was the main cause, but I also think that render products must have improved in recent years. Whatever the reasons, the 3-4 year old homes in my area with full render in light colours look as good as new.
Anyway, you could say we took an each-way bet, because we have render
and brick. And weatherboard.
Although we liked the look of full render, we ended up using mostly brick on our house, with a couple feature areas of render - the columns at the front of the house and either side of the garage. The renderer is currently doing it now so I can't comment on maintenance. The deciding factors for us were:
- cost (only $800 for render we are getting compared to thousands to do whole house)
- maintenance - if it needs to be redone or repainted, this is probably something DH would do, rather than have to pay someone to do the whole house
- we were worried about cracking, it may not be as common anymore, but it can still happen
- If we decide we want full render in the future, we can always do it, bit hard to go from full render back to brick
We are very happy with the result so far, I think it gives a nice look to the house and we can update the look of the house just with a quick repaint of the render in future if we wish (we have gone for a neutral brick which I don't think will date very quickly)
Funny you should mention this
In fact I was discussing today at the expo today and also arguing my point the fact that need in many Latin American countries where in the poor villages many could not afford to render the whole wall and they were partially finished with bricks exposed. This was noticed by Japanese(substantial number live there)architects and translated in housing architecture features so now we have uncoordinated styles.
There is not hard or fast rule do it as you see fit to do.
As far as rendering I said to the guy that one of my project was to render a wall 7 metres high by 37 long as I got tired the rendering became weaker and weaker so wasn't smooth but patterned. He laughed saying how that was exactly was Aussie owners were looking at getting these days. What peole don't want in other countries translates as fashion on others. May be I should recycle myself as a designer! Don't you think?
We're going full brick. We may render later but will live in the house for a bit and see how we like it. We chose an included brick and upgraded our roof tile instead so if we do render we haven't wasted money on selected bricks.
I think if you're undecided stick with brick. Easy to render later (and much cheaper) but you can't go back to brick.