Regardless of what you side your home exterior with, your façade is not going to be complete without trim. Wood trim is traditionally used to complete the edges of the home, as well as to frame out windows and doorways, giving them a more substantial and polished look.
Unfortunately, wood trim is one of the most difficult things to keep up with on your home. Why? These thinner planks of wood often peel, chip, shrink, crack, and need a lot more maintenance than even your wood siding does. That’s why having a wood trim alternative for your exterior makes so much sense.
The Role of Trim on a House
Trim plays a bigger role in a home’s exterior than you may first think. It serves a functional purpose, covering the ends of siding and making neat corners, but it also serves a decorative purpose as well. Trim is often used to add a little contrast to the home, either subtle by matching the color of your siding, or more dramatic with a bold color switch.
Trim stands out from siding by moving in different directions, being slightly thicker than the siding, so it’s placed closer to you, and by creating a smooth, finished appearance for corners, siding material or color changes, and the area around windows and doors.
Think of trim as a frame for your home; just as a picture’s frame is used to highlight and show off a painting, house trim shows off and highlights your home. Without it, your home won’t have the same polished appearance or finished style, and will just look incomplete.
Fascia Board: A Wood Trim Alternative
There are many times when you need to trim out some areas on the face of your home that are typically surrounded by siding. For example, you may want to trim out the areas surrounding your windows in a coordinating or contrasting color to your lap siding. In this case, you’ll need a fascia board that will match the thickness of the lap siding, give you the texture of real wood, and come in the colors you need to complete the look.
Fiber Cement Trim Characteristics and Design Options
When you’re turning the corners on your home’s exterior, making a more prominent transition between two siding types, or you’re creating a decorative, wood-look structure adjacent to your home, you will need a more substantial trim.
7/16-inch fiber cement Plycem trim is the answer. This cedar wood grain-look trim comes ready to paint in a variety of different widths from 3-1/2-inches to 11-1/4-inches, all in 12-foot lengths for added versatility. Paint the trim to contrast or coordinate with your lap siding, then frame out your windows, doors, or other small decorative areas where a contrasting trim is needed.
You can also use a fascia board to make the switch between siding types on the upper and lower stories of your home to get a more custom look.
Available in 25 solid colors, Plycem’s 4/4 reversible trim is finished with Allura’s ColorMax finishing system, which resists fading, peeling, or chipping, giving you longer to enjoy before you need to repaint. This means that using Plycem 4/4 trim for your exterior finishing needs won’t require the same type or level of scraping or maintenance that you’ll find with traditional wood trim. You can also get this trim as ready to paint so you can get the perfect, unique color for your trim as well.
One side of the trim has the real wood grain look you’ve come to expect from fiber cement, allowing you to create a more natural-looking façade for your home. The other side of the trim is smooth, however, giving you the option to use the same trim on homes with architectural panels or for more contemporary looking structures.
Plycem 4/4 trim comes in widths ranging from 2-inches to 12-inches, all in 12-foot lengths. This gives you a lot of options for how and where you’ll use this trim, from decorative wood-look moldings on your deck or porch to substantial horizontal seams breaking up two different types of siding on your home’s face.
Sometimes you need trim that not only has a real wood grain look, but also has a long-lasting, and low-maintenance wood-look stain. For this, Plycem’s 5/4 trim is the perfect solution.
Made of the same durable fiber cement as their other trims, 5/4 is a substantial, thick trim with real-looking wood grain on one side, and a smooth surface on the other. This enables you to use 5/4 trim on a variety of different styles of homes from rustic cabins to contemporary villas. The trim is available in 25 solid colors to coordinate with any of Allura’s siding colors, as well as 6 natural-looking wood stains as well, giving you a number of options for how you’ll finish your home.
5/4 trim is available in widths ranging from 3-inches to 12-inches, all in 12-foot lengths, so you can trim out your windows and doors, edge your home’s corners, create a square, clean lines and planes for decks and porch roofs, or come up with a look that’s all your own. 5/4 trim is durable and long-lasting, finished with ColorMax so it will resist peeling, fading, and chipping. It’s also insect-resistant as well as fire and impact-resistant, so you can worry less about your trim warping, swelling, or rotting over time.
With Plycem trim, your entire home exterior can now be low maintenance from top to bottom.
Achieve the Look of Wood Trim with a Better Alternative
It’s not enough to invest in a siding material that’s durable and low-maintenance; your trim needs to be just as worry-free. Make the switch to fiber cement siding and Plycem trim from Allura to get durable, beautiful, low maintenance coverage for your entire home today.
