The Job Worth the Drive
About This Project
When this project came to us, the property on South Hosmer was Hosmer Self Storage — an independent Tacoma facility whose aging cladding had reached the end: every storage row, every gable end, the rear alley walls, and the two-story office with its corner turret. The answer was yes, and worth the drive south — one of our earliest commercial projects, and still one of the largest single properties we've re-clad.
A working storage facility is its own discipline. The property stayed open and gated the entire time — customers coming and going, security cameras live, every wall rebuilt around a business that never closed.
A Facility-Sized Re-Side
The whole property went into primed 8¼-inch HardiePlank in Cedarmill texture — building after building, wall after wall, from the customer-facing rows above the blue roll-up doors to the narrow rear runs that only the crew and the fence line ever see. Those got the same planks and the same care; fiber cement doesn't know which wall gets photographed.
The detail work on a working facility is in everything attached to the walls: meter banks, service masts, conduit runs, security cameras, floodlights, vents, and signage boxes all came off, and all went back on over the new siding with fresh flashing and sealant — the facility's infrastructure never skipped a day. The roll-up doors themselves stayed exactly where they were.
The Problem Only Experience Solves
This project carried one puzzle that made it unlike any house we'd sided: the inner garage-door trim on the rented units was in bad shape — but replacing inner door trim the conventional way means opening every single unit. For an occupied storage facility, that's dozens of tenants to schedule, dozens of units full of belongings to work around, and a liability headache nobody wants.
So we engineered around it. SWV drew up a custom metal flashing detail — fabricated to fully encase the inner garage-door trim in waterproof metal, with a z-flashing built into the top piece so water sheds away from every opening, delivered primed and ready for paint. Every unit's trim got protected without a single tenant being asked to open a door. The business kept operating, the liability question never came up, and the doors got a detail that will outlast the trim it protects. Unique problems require experience to find solutions — and that's exactly what this one got.
Photographed in Primer, on Purpose
These photos show the facility exactly as we handed it over: wrapped in James Hardie's factory primer coat, ready for the owner's painters on their own schedule. Primed Hardie is engineered to wait for paint, and what the primer shows better than any color could: clean course lines building after building, wrapped corners, flashed penetrations, and walls that will outlast every unit door on the property.
The epilogue is the part we like best. Extra Space Storage — one of the largest self-storage operators in the country — later acquired the property, and today the walls we built wear a national brand's colors. When a company that owns thousands of buildings buys one you re-clad, that's a compliment no review card can match.
