Auckland · The first question, before colour
Your cladding decides your job. Everything else is detail.
Before anyone can tell you what a repaint involves, they have to know what the wall is made of. It changes the preparation, the primer, the number of coats, the number of days on site, and whether painting is even the right work to be doing.
95% vs 2%
When New Zealand’s weathertightness failures were costed, monolithic and stucco cladding carried an estimated 95% failure rate against 2% for weatherboard. Two walls, the same square metres, entirely different jobs. These are national estimates for the 1992–2005 build period, not a finding about any one house.
The number that reorders everything
The failure risk was never evenly spread
This is the single most useful figure in New Zealand residential construction, and almost nobody quoting a repaint mentions it. The weathertightness failures of the 1990s and 2000s were not distributed across the housing stock. They concentrated almost entirely in one cladding family.
Read that carefully, because it is easy to over-read. It does not say 95% of monolithic houses leak. It says that when the national cost of weathertightness failure was estimated, the failures sat overwhelmingly in monolithic and stucco construction from that build period. Weatherboard, which was the older and less fashionable choice, mostly did not fail.
What follows for a repaint is practical rather than dramatic. On weatherboard, the paint film is the main line of defence and preparation is about restoring it. On monolithic, the paint film is one layer of a system that also includes flashings, joints, clearances and drainage — and if that system has already let water in, a new coat of paint hides the evidence without fixing anything.
So the honest sequence on a plaster-clad Auckland house is: moisture readings first, findings second, specification third, colour last. That page is here, and it is the one worth reading properly.
PwC for the Department of Building and Housing, “Weathertightness — Estimating the Cost” · 2009
The national picture, and its limits
What New Zealand houses are clad in — and why we cannot narrow it to your street
Three cladding families cover most of the country’s houses. That is a national survey figure, and it is the finest resolution anyone can honestly publish.
There is no per-suburb cladding dataset in New Zealand
This matters enough to state twice. The Census does not ask what a house is clad in, and it does not ask what year it was built. No government agency publishes cladding material or dwelling age by suburb, mesh block or street. Auckland Council’s property records are not open data at that level either.
So the figures above are national, from a BRANZ house-condition survey. They tell you what to expect in the housing stock as a whole. They cannot tell you what is on the four houses either side of you, and any site that shows you a suburb-level cladding chart has modelled it from house age and zoning rather than measured it.
What we can do at suburb level is the planning overlay, because that genuinely is published: Special Character Areas and scheduled historic heritage. That is a different question — what you are allowed to change — but for a street-facing repaint it is often the one that bites.
By substrate
Five substrates, five different jobs
Each of these is written for the wall, not for the brochure. Start with the one you have.
Timber weatherboard
Kauri, cedar and pine. Moisture testing, timber repair, three-coat systems — and lead paint on anything pre-1980.
Plaster & monolithic
Stucco, EIFS and texture coat. Cracks, membranes, and the hard question of whether paint is the right work at all.
Brick & block
Close to irreversible. Breathability, efflorescence, and the cases where the answer is simply do not.
Fibre cement
Hardiplank and sheet. Jointing, chalking, and the asbestos question on older sheet.
Roofs
Long-run steel, pressed metal tile, concrete tile and Decramastic. Including when to stop coating and replace.
The order of operations
How a competent exterior job is sequenced
This order is the same on every substrate. What changes is how long each step takes and what it costs — which is exactly why a single rate per square metre does not survive contact with a real house.
- 01
Identify the substrate, at every elevation
Including the ones that are not the same as the front. A weatherboard villa with a plastered 1990s addition is two jobs on one invoice, and it needs two specifications.
- 02
Moisture readings before anything else
Non-invasive readings around windows, at the base of walls, under decks and at every junction. On monolithic cladding this step is not optional. It is the step that decides whether the rest of the job is painting or building work.
- 03
Wash, and then wait
Moss, mould, chalk, salt and airborne grime all defeat adhesion. Auckland walls carry all five. The wall must then dry back — which in winter is the constraint that quietly runs the whole programme.
- 04
Repair the substrate, not the paint
Rotten timber cut out and replaced, cracks routed and filled, joints re-sealed, flashings checked. Filling over a moving crack guarantees it reopens in the same place in the same season.
- 05
Prime for the substrate you actually have
Bare timber, chalky old acrylic, alkaline new plaster, galvanised steel and factory-primed fibre cement all want different primers. This is where cheap jobs are cheap.
- 06
Two topcoats, applied inside the limits
Air temperature, humidity, dew point margin and the rain window are published limits, not preferences. Auckland only meets all of them on some days, so the calendar is part of the specification.
Questions people actually ask
How do I tell what my cladding actually is?
Look at a corner and at a window reveal. Timber weatherboard shows overlapping horizontal boards with a visible shadow line and a mitred or scribed corner. Fibre cement plank looks similar but the board edge is dead straight, the surface has no grain movement, and it sounds dense rather than hollow when tapped. Monolithic and stucco read as one continuous surface with no board lines at all, and the window reveals are usually recessed into the wall rather than sitting on it. Brick is obvious. If you have more than one of these on the same house, you are normal — nationally about 34% of houses carry more than one cladding type.
Is there a dataset that tells me what cladding my suburb has?
No. New Zealand publishes no per-suburb cladding dataset and no per-suburb house-age dataset. The Census records neither cladding material nor the year a dwelling was built. The national cladding mix on this page comes from a BRANZ house-condition survey and is a national figure, not an Auckland one and certainly not a street-level one. Anyone showing you a cladding breakdown for your suburb has estimated it.
Why does cladding change the price more than floor area does?
Because preparation is most of the labour, and preparation is entirely a function of the substrate. A sound weatherboard wall needs washing, scraping, sanding, spot-priming and three coats. A cracked plaster wall needs moisture readings, crack routing and filling, a reinforced patch, a sealer and often a high-build elastomeric membrane. Same square metres, very different number of days on site. Floor area does not tell you which one you have.
My house is monolithic. Does that mean it is a leaky home?
No. The 95% figure on this page is the estimated share of weathertightness failures that occurred in monolithic and stucco-clad houses, for the 1992–2005 build period. It is not the probability that any given monolithic house is failing. It does mean the risk is concentrated in that group, which is why a monolithic repaint should begin with moisture readings rather than with a colour.
Can one painter do every cladding type?
Most can paint any of them. Fewer can specify correctly for all of them, and the specification is what decides whether the job lasts eight years or three. Ask which primer they would use on your substrate and why. A painter who cannot answer that for your particular wall has not looked at it.
Does painting fix a weathertightness problem?
No, and treating it as though it does is how small problems become expensive ones. Paint is a coating, not a flashing and not a drainage cavity. If water is entering the wall, coating over the outside can trap moisture in the framing. That is a recladding investigation, not a painting job.
When it stops being a paint job
If the moisture readings come back wet, the next conversation is about cladding, flashings and framing — not colour.
Renovate Auckland — recladding