Chico Elite Stucco is a stucco contractor working in Orland, California, and on most walls here the first question is not what color the finish should be but what is happening at the bottom of it. Our stucco services fall into three groups. On walls that are already standing we handle stucco repair, remediation and inspection. Where the finish itself has failed, gone chalky or stopped shedding water, you need recoating or resurfacing, and we paint and coat stucco as well. Where a wall goes on or comes off we handle installation, stucco replacement and new construction, and on a new build we start at the lath, the metal or wire mesh the plaster is pressed into.
We do this work on houses and on commercial buildings, and commercial jobs run on a longer schedule. We also apply interior plaster and stone veneer, and we do decorative stucco, the molded and patterned work described further down.
Orland was laid out around a federal irrigation project, so on most parcels here water runs or stands somewhere near the house for part of the year. That water changes what we look at first. The base of a wall sits closest to wet ground, and to whatever a ditch or a sprinkler throws at it.
Behind the plaster sits the water-resistive barrier, the layer that handles anything getting past the surface. Over metal lath, traditional portland cement plaster is built up in three coats to a nominal 7/8 inch, meaning about that thickness rather than exactly it. ASTM C926 is the industry standard that sets how the plaster is mixed and applied.
We work throughout Chico and Butte County, including Oroville and the ridge communities, and we also serve parts of Glenn and Tehama counties. Orland is one of the Glenn County towns that footprint covers. To talk about your wall, call us at (530) 783-7384 or send us the details through our quote form.
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Before we price a wall in Orland, we walk the ground it stands on. We look for the ditch or lateral running along the property line, we note where the sprinklers throw and how far, and we follow the fall of the ground to see which side of the house it drains toward. On this flat valley ground, what we find there decides whether your wall needs a repair, or whether the reason for the damage has to be dealt with first. Telling you that before you spend money is part of the job.
What you get from Chico Elite Stucco as your local stucco contractor comes down to a few commitments:
We have more than 15 years of stucco experience and are licensed and insured, carrying general liability and workers' compensation. The estimate is free and done on site. Call us at (530) 783-7384 and we will come out and look at the parcel with you. We also work down the valley as a stucco contractor in Willows.
Water runs near most parcels in Orland, California. That is why all thirteen of the stucco services below begin with the same question, whatever the job is called: is the wall dry, and will it stay dry. Answer that first and the rest of the work holds. As a stucco contractor working across this ground, we would rather settle it before we quote than find it halfway through. Here is what our stucco company does.
A coating is a paint film laid over a wall that is already sound, and the most common kind here is an elastomeric coating, a thick flexible paint that bridges hairline cracking. Color is what it gives you. Body is what it does not: stucco painting and coatings add no thickness the wall can rely on, and they do not stop water that is arriving from somewhere else. We put a coating on once we are satisfied the wall is dry the whole way through.
Stucco installation puts a full plaster system on a wall that has never carried one. We start with metal lath, along with the trims and edge pieces that have to go on before any material is mixed. On a parcel here the first thing we settle is the bottom edge of the wall and what sits beneath it, because that edge is where water leaves the wall. Three coats follow. The scratch coat goes on first, then the brown coat, then the finish.
Residential stucco is house work, and out here a house is usually on an open lot with a shop or a barn near it and farm ground worked up to the line. That shapes the quote more than the style of the house does: we price the elevations that are exposed, the ones behind planting, and the outbuildings, as one job.
A stucco inspection is us walking the wall, reading it, and telling you plainly what we found. Where you have asked us to recoat, that includes a moisture survey. We take readings through the wall to find out whether water is sitting inside it. You get the findings whichever way they point.
Stucco repair is for damage held to one part of a wall, not spread across it. We cut back until we reach material that is still sound, then rebuild out from there. The damage we see most on these parcels is at the base of a wall, and a patch there will not hold while water is still arriving, so that gets dealt with first.
Some walls cannot be patched, and stucco removal and replacement takes the plaster back to the framing when the system underneath it has failed. On construction put up before 1980, material is tested for asbestos and lead before anything is disturbed. Once the wall is open we replace the water-resistive barrier as well as the plaster, since putting new material over an old barrier leaves the part that was failing in place.
Stucco remediation deals with a wall that is already wet and with whatever the water has reached behind it. We open the wall where the moisture readings lead us, and the wet area sets how far we go, not the shape of the elevation. Where mold is visible on a wall that has been opened, a qualified independent specialist handles that assessment, since testing and removal are their own trade.
Orland's highway-side frontage and the working buildings behind it both need commercial stucco, and the owner's concern in either case is that the doors stay open. We phase the work so the business keeps trading, taking one stretch of wall at a time. One point of contact covers the whole property.
Adhered stone veneer is thin cut stone set in mortar over lath and a scratch coat, the first rough layer of plaster. We run it as one system with the stucco around it, most often on wainscots, columns and entry faces. Both finishes sit over the same drainage plane behind them, so what protects one protects the other.
We use stucco plastering on more than the house. We plaster garden walls, porch ceilings and parapets, the low walls that run up past a roof edge, in the same portland cement plaster. A freestanding garden wall takes rain and spray on both faces and along the top, which gives water three ways in instead of one. Indoors it is the same trade with different material.
On new construction stucco we arrive at the lath stage and work to the builder's dates. The lath inspection is the hold point the schedule turns on, since nothing can be covered until it is signed off. We set that date with the general contractor and plan our crews around it.
Interior stucco brings plaster and textured finishes inside, onto walls, ceilings, fireplace faces and feature walls. Nothing indoors is weathered, so the appearance of the finish is the whole job. Detail and ornamental work has its own section below.
Stucco resurfacing puts a fresh finish coat over a wall that is sound underneath but tired on the surface. A redash, a new textured layer troweled over the old one, gives the wall body that a paint film cannot. Sound underneath is the condition the whole job rests on, and we check it before we price anything.
Orland sits inside a federal irrigation project, so a stucco contractor working here is working next to water all year rather than only after rain. Three questions decide how a wall lasts: where that water sits outside the wall, whether the wall can let out what gets behind it, and how we find out which of those is happening before we recommend anything.
An irrigation lateral or a ditch line along a property boundary is ordinary in Orland, not a sign that something has gone wrong. What does damage is closer in. A sprinkler head aimed so that it throws against a wall wets that wall on every cycle. Ground that falls toward the house, instead of away from it, holds runoff against the base of the exterior plaster.
The side of the house nearest the water is usually where the cracking, staining and soft patches appear first. Often there is efflorescence across it too, the chalky white bloom left behind when water moves through plaster and dries out of it. That is why we walk the whole perimeter and not only the elevation you called us about. Where the plaster stops above the soil sits the weep screed, a metal strip that lets water drain out from behind it.
Because the water is arriving from outside, the repair that holds is often outside too: moving a sprinkler head, regrading a few feet of soil, keeping the ground clear at the base. That is drainage detailing, and it is cheaper than replastering the same elevation twice.
Stucco is not a waterproof skin and was never built to be one. Some water always gets through, so what protects the house is the layer underneath: the water-resistive barrier, a sheet material fixed to the wall behind the plaster. It works as a drainage plane, meaning water that gets in runs down the face of it and back out at the bottom rather than soaking into the wood behind.
Over wood-based sheathing the code asks for two independent layers of 10-minute Grade D paper, each one a continuous plane on its own. The ten minutes is how long the paper holds out water in a standard test, and doubling it is what buys the wall its drainage. A single 60-minute layer works too, kept apart from the plaster by a drainage space or a non-absorbing layer. Two loose sheets stapled up and treated as one plane do not satisfy it. Ask to see the barrier before the brown coat goes on, because once that thick leveling layer covers it nobody can tell which was done.
An elastomeric coating is often sold as the cure for a wall that leaks. On a wall still taking water in behind the plaster it does the opposite. Many of these films have a low perm rating, meaning they let very little moisture pass back out, so water that keeps arriving is sealed in against the framing. Perm ratings differ a lot between products, which is why the coating has to be chosen against where the water actually is.
We run a moisture survey first: readings taken across the whole elevation with a meter, which tell us not only that the wall is wet but which parts of it are and how far the wet area reaches. That pattern usually points back to a source outside. Where the readings show water still coming in, we say so and we fix the source before any finish goes on, even when the job you asked us to quote was the coating.
Orland is small enough that the work splits cleanly in two. Downtown is part of the city itself, a few blocks of older buildings standing shoulder to shoulder. Capay is a separate community out in Glenn County farm ground, close enough that we cover it under the same footprint. The walls in those two places fail for different reasons and need different work, so we treat them as different jobs.
The city's zoning calls these blocks Downtown Mixed-Use, and the name describes how the buildings are used: a shop or office at street level with dwellings above it or in the basement. That means stucco painting and coatings on a street-facing wall is work happening over someone's storefront and under someone's home at once. If you own one of these buildings, we stage around both and not around the shopfront alone. Parking downtown is a shared district instead of a lot behind each building, so we plan where our equipment stands before the first day.
Capay is an unincorporated community about seven miles east-northeast of Orland, near the town but not inside it, on the old Rancho Capay land grant patented in 1859. The name comes from a Wintun word for stream. Out here the ground around a house is watered all season, and a wall standing in wet ground takes water on from below and behind instead of wearing out at the surface. Stucco remediation is the answer to that, because the trouble is water inside the wall and not a tired finish.
Work in Orland runs along a line from the highway out toward the lake. At the town end, where Interstate 5 passes the western edge, a storefront or shop faces traffic all day. Further west the parcels open up and a house sits on acreage with its own outbuildings around it. What changes along that line is the access and what else stands on the property, and we quote across the whole of it.
On a highway-side building, the front elevation is the wall the public looks at, and it is usually the one in the soundest condition because it gets the attention. The walls that have gone are the side and back ones, out of sight behind the building, where cracking and loose finish have been left alone for years.
That gives you one property carrying two different jobs, and we price both in a single visit so the urgent wall is not discovered after the visible one is already done. Commercial stucco near the traffic also picks up road film, a gray haze of dust and exhaust residue that settles into the texture and dulls a finish faster than it does further out.
Out about eight miles west toward Black Butte Lake, houses stand on larger lots with a shop, a barn or a garage nearby. Residential stucco on those places means more than the house, so we measure and quote the outbuildings with it, so nobody has to come back for them later in the year. A shop or barn wall is often in worse shape than the house, because it gets looked at less and nobody notices the finish going. Before the crew arrives we also confirm where the mixer and the pallets of material can stand, close enough to the walls being worked on that nothing has to be carried across a yard all day.
We install decorative stucco finishes on walls all over Orland. Decorative stucco is the shaped work that sits on a plastered wall: a raised band running under the eave, a thicker border around a window, a ledge beneath a sill, a bracket under a projecting roof edge.
All of it is formed and coated as part of the wall, not fixed on once the wall is finished. The same finish coat runs across the flat surface and over the shape, with no joint between them. We build these shapes in plaster so they carry the wall's own finish and move with it. Foam-and-base-coat trim is a real method and some builders prefer it for deep profiles; it is simply not what we install.
On a house, we usually install a band under the eave, a surround on a window, a sill course carried along the front, or a textured panel on the entry face. Because those shapes take the same coating as the wall around them, they weather at the same rate and hold their color as the wall changes. Anything applied separately eventually looks like a separate piece stuck to the front of your house.
Before we touch the wall, we work up a sample panel and match the texture and the color on it against what you already have. You approve the match on a small piece, not on a finished elevation. We record the pigment information used on that sample and keep it with your job.
Decorative stucco on an older building in Orland is harder, because the detail already exists and has to be copied rather than designed. We take the profile off the run that is there, tracing its cross-section the way you would trace the end of a length of molding, and we work out the texture the original finish was worked to. Then we decide whether a length of the run can be repaired in place or has to come off and be replaced. Where the history of the material is unclear, we open a small area first and look at what is behind the surface rather than pricing the wall blind.
Yes, though it changes what we look at rather than what your wall is made of. The distance from the ditch matters less than the way the ground between it and the house falls. A wall fifty feet from a ditch on ground that slopes back toward the house is worse off than one twenty feet away on ground that carries water away. We walk that ground before we quote your wall.
We measure it rather than judge it by eye. A wall can read dry at the surface while the material behind the plaster is still holding water, so readings are taken across the whole elevation and at the base, not at one spot. The wall that looks worst is not always the one that measures worst. If the readings say the wall is not dry, we tell you and recommend the job that fixes the water instead.
It becomes one, and it starts as a ground problem. Summer pooling here is normally an irrigation setting or a raised bed sitting against the wall rather than rainfall, which is why it appears in the driest months. That makes it the case where the cheapest repair is often not stucco work at all, and we will tell you so if that is what we find.
Yes. Before a day out there we ask whether there is a water supply we can use on site and whether a vehicle can get close to the elevation we are working on. On a larger parcel those two answers change how the day runs more than the drive does.
That is the City of Orland building department's call, and the answer depends on what the job actually is. A recoat and a full tear-off and replacement are different questions to put to them. Describe the work accurately when you ask, and we make that call with the city as part of the job.
Yes, Orland is inside the area we cover. An estimate here is a scheduled visit like any other rather than something fitted in around Chico work, so ask for one the same way anyone closer would. Call us at (530) 783-7384 or use the quote form and a stucco contractor will come out to your property.
A free estimate starts with someone standing on your ground. We come out to the property, walk the parcel as well as the wall, and write a scope that names the system going on the building and the finish that will sit on top of it. That written scope is what you hold Chico Elite Stucco to, and it is what lets you compare one stucco contractor against another on the same terms. Call or use our online form now for a free estimate. Reach us at (530) 783-7384.
