About the founder
Mahmoud Ardeshiri
Founder and lead cladding contractor, Silver Siding Exterior
Mahmoud Ardeshiri has spent more than a decade in exterior cladding in British Columbia. He prices, plans and supervises most of what Silver Siding Exterior builds, and on residential work he usually draws the facade layout himself. He began in the trade carrying material up a ladder for somebody else.
Starting again, from the bottom
Mahmoud arrived in Canada with a construction background and a business of his own in another industry, where he had also chaired a national trade association. On a Vancouver job site none of that counted for anything. His first work here was as an hourly labourer for a construction company — carrying, cutting, cleaning up and watching how the good installers did it.
Within two to three years he was no longer paid by the hour. He was taking on scopes by the square foot for companies that held the head contract, which meant he was responsible for the quality of what he handed back rather than the hours he put in. That is where the habits came from: measure it properly the first time, because nobody is paying you to do it twice.
He registered Silver Siding Exterior in 2015 and began taking work directly. Some of the same companies he once subcontracted for still send him projects.
Where his expertise sits
Mahmoud's interest is in newer cladding, not the products everyone already installs. Most of his attention over the past several years has gone into architectural metal cladding and the panel systems that come with it — where tolerances are tighter, the substrate matters more, and a small error is visible from across the street.
That includes aluminum composite panel assemblies for both commercial facades and signage, along with concealed-fastener systems and prefinished aluminum products such as Longboard's wood-grain aluminum siding. He installs fibre cement as well, and works comfortably with mixed-material elevations, which is what most clients are now asking for — two or three claddings on one building rather than a single finish across the whole envelope. The one thing he does not take on is stucco.
On residential projects the facade layout is usually his. Owners tend to arrive with a rough idea of the panel size they want and little else, so he sets the module, works out where the joint lines fall, and shows them the cost consequences before anything is ordered.
How he approaches a job
Mahmoud has no difficulty being told to change something, and he will often raise the problem himself — even when the owner is perfectly happy and even when saying so costs him money. In practice it usually has. Every time he has pointed out a defect the client had not noticed, fixing it came out of his own margin.
“It is like a stain on a white shirt. A hundred people can walk past you and never see it. But you know it is there, and it bothers you.”
Mahmoud Ardeshiri
The clearest example is the North Vancouver project below, where a colour mismatch nobody had asked him to fix ended up being repainted, in full, at his own expense.
Selected project experience
A four-material elevation, and a repaint he paid for
This build combined brick cladding with aluminum composite panel and two different fibre cement profiles on a single elevation. A premium imported product had been specified for the areas between the windows; when the cost came back, the owner chose not to proceed with it, and Mahmoud's team detailed an aluminum composite panel substitution in its place.
The bigger problem was scheduling. The fibre cement had been specified with a factory-applied colour finish carrying roughly a six-week lead time, which the programme could not absorb. The team switched to primed board, painting it on the ground and installing it as it dried. The result was close — but not identical to the factory finish, and the project manager rejected it. Mahmoud brought in painters and had the entire cladding repainted on site, absorbing the cost himself rather than leaving a facade he would have known was wrong every time he drove past it.
A vertical profile that hides nothing
This commercial project used a heavyweight fibre cement V-groove profile — 5/8 in. thick, considerably dearer than standard plank — installed vertically, alongside aluminum composite signage panel. The difficulty with a board like this is that it has some give. It will not hold itself flat, so it follows whatever is behind it; any dip or step in the substrate reappears on the finished face as a visible wave.
Large parts of the existing substrate were out of true. Rather than install over it and hope the shadow lines disguised the problem, the crew shimmed and furred the wall back to plane before a single board went up. The finished elevation reads flat because the wall behind it was made flat first.
Getting the layout right on metal
Panel layout is the part of metal work Mahmoud considers most underrated, because it is what people actually see. Decks and framing are commonly built to a drainage fall, so a wall that should read level can be two or three inches out from one end to the other. Panels then have to be individually adjusted so the finished face looks square from the street, even though the structure behind it is not.
The joint lines matter just as much. Where panel lines do not align with window heads and sills, the elevation reads as a mistake even to people who could not say why, and every misaligned corner is one more place for water to find a path down the wall. Mahmoud sets out the module from both corners before ordering, so panels come out at a consistent width across the elevation instead of leaving a narrow offcut at one end. Several examples of how this looks in practice are in the project gallery.
Keeping up with the material
Cladding products change quickly, and most of what is genuinely new shows up at trade exhibitions before it reaches suppliers here. Mahmoud attends industry shows in Canada and the United States specifically to see new systems in person, handle the profiles, and talk to the manufacturers before deciding whether anything is worth bringing onto a job.
The ones he returns to are BUILDEX Vancouver at the Vancouver Convention Centre, BUILDEX Alberta at the BMO Centre in Calgary, and the NAHB International Builders' Show in Las Vegas — the three that reliably bring new cladding and panel systems onto the floor rather than just the same catalogue in a different city.
Credentials, safety and compliance
Silver Siding Exterior operates as a licensed and insured contractor, and Mahmoud runs the company's site safety programme himself — the same documentation that commercial general contractors require before a crew is allowed on site.
- Registered and in good standing with WorkSafeBC
- Full liability insurance carried on every project
- Documented site safety plan and written procedures, issued per project
- Personal safety training completed by every member of the crew, with fall protection used in accordance with WorkSafeBC requirements
- Eye and respiratory protection during cutting, with silica dust from fibre cement controlled at source
- Correct use and inspection of tools and access equipment
- Daily site clean-down and full clearance at handover
- Five-year workmanship warranty on completed installations
Where he works
Mahmoud lives in West Vancouver, and Silver Siding Exterior takes on both residential and commercial cladding across Metro Vancouver. He deliberately keeps project volume selective, so that he is on site for the parts of a job that decide how it turns out.
Talk to Mahmoud about your project
Estimates are free, and Mahmoud prices and walks the job himself. He also writes about materials and detailing on the Silver Siding blog.
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