Anacortes Exterior LP SmartSide comes up a lot in siding conversations around Anacortes, usually because it's engineered wood, it's less expensive than fiber cement up front, and it has a real manufacturer behind it. We get asked about it often enough that it's worth laying out, plainly, why we don't put it on homes here — and why we install James Hardie fiber cement instead.
What LP SmartSide actually is
LP SmartSide is an engineered wood siding product: wood strands bonded with resins and waxes, then treated with a zinc borate preservative and coated with a resin-saturated overlay. It's a legitimate step up from the OSB-based sidings that gave engineered wood a bad name decades ago, and LP backs it with a solid warranty when it's installed and maintained correctly. We're not here to tell you it's a bad product. We're here to explain why it's not the product we choose to stand behind on a house in Skagit County.
The core issue: it's still wood
Underneath the coatings and treatments, LP SmartSide's structural core is wood fiber. Wood, no matter how it's engineered or sealed, has one defining trait fiber cement doesn't: it swells and shrinks with moisture, and it's a food source if moisture ever gets past the surface. In most of the country, that's a manageable risk. In Anacortes, it's a bigger one.
This part of Skagit County sits right on the water, and that means a specific combination of stressors on any wood-based building product:
- Salt air that accelerates the breakdown of coatings, sealants, and caulk joints over time
- Driving rain off the Sound that gets pushed sideways into seams, butt joints, and fastener heads rather than just falling straight down
- A long moss season — mild, wet stretches for much of the year that keep exterior surfaces damp longer than drier inland climates, which is exactly the condition organic materials don't want
LP SmartSide's warranty and performance depend heavily on an intact factory coating and disciplined field practices: every cut edge primed and sealed, every joint properly caulked, correct fastener placement, and paint maintenance on a real schedule. That's true of any wood siding, but it matters more here than it does in a dry climate, because the margin for a missed detail is smaller when the product sits wet more often than not.
Where the risk actually shows up
The failures we see with engineered wood siding in this region aren't dramatic. They're slow and cumulative:
- Butt joints and cut ends that weren't field-sealed, allowing moisture to wick into the substrate over a few winters
- Caulk joints that dry out and crack in the salt air faster than they would inland, opening a path for water before anyone notices
- Bottom edges near grade, decks, or sprinkler overspray staying damp long enough for swelling or soft spots to develop
- Paint and coating maintenance getting deferred a year or two — which is enough time for a small gap to become a real problem
None of this means the product is defective. It means engineered wood siding asks for a level of installation precision and long-term upkeep that's harder to guarantee in a marine climate, and the consequences of a shortcut show up as rot rather than just cosmetic wear.
Why we standardized on James Hardie instead
We made a decision as a company to install one siding system — James Hardie fiber cement — rather than offer several products at different price points. Fiber cement is cement, sand, and cellulose fiber. It doesn't have a wood core to swell, rot, or feed pests, and it's non-combustible, which matters given the wildfire smoke seasons the Pacific Northwest has seen in recent summers.
Specific to a climate like ours, Hardie's HZ10 product line is engineered for the wetter, harsher weather zones — a distinction that exists precisely because coastal and Pacific Northwest conditions are harder on siding than a national-average climate. The ColorPlus factory finish is baked on and warrantied against fading and peeling separately from the substrate, which takes the "did the paint job get maintained on schedule" variable largely out of the equation. And Hardie's transferable warranty is backed by a company whose entire business is fiber cement, not one product line among several.
The honest trade-off
Fiber cement costs more than engineered wood up front, it's heavier to work with, and it requires siding-rated blades and proper fastening technique — installer skill matters with any product. What you get in exchange, especially this close to the water, is a siding material that isn't fighting its own composition against the climate. For a house that's going to sit through forty or fifty more moss seasons in Anacortes, we think that trade-off is the right one.
If you're weighing siding options for a home here, we're happy to walk through what we see locally and why we'd recommend Hardie for your specific house. Reach out for a free, no-pressure estimate — we'll look at your siding, your exposure to weather and salt air, and give you a straight answer.