Stucco Contractor in Palermo, CA: Recoating, Repair and Interior Plaster | Chico Elite Stucco

A coating is a paint film with body, rolled or sprayed over a wall that is already sound. Elastomeric coating stretches a little as the wall warms and cools; acrylic coating is thinner and harder. Neither is a repair. A coating cannot bridge a crack that is still moving, and it cannot dry a wall that is holding water, because a film laid over a damp wall seals the water behind it and keeps it there.

A coating is for renewal on a schedule, and the wall sets that schedule, not your calendar. One elevation of a house often comes due while the other three are still fine. An elevation is one side of the building, and it is the unit we price in, so we will quote that side on its own.

We install new stucco on a wall that has never had any, which on an addition, a remodel or a conversion from wood or vinyl siding means starting at the framing. Metal lath goes on first, a mesh that gives the plaster something to grip. Over it go three coats: the scratch coat, raked with lines so the next one holds; the brown coat, which flattens the wall; and the finish coat, which carries the texture and the color. Waiting is part of the job.

Each of the first two coats is kept damp for at least 48 hours so the cement hardens properly, the brown coat goes on no sooner than 48 hours after the scratch coat, and the finish coat no sooner than 7 days after the brown. Those minimums come from the California building code, not from us, so we plan the start date around them and tell you the finish date at the same time.

Houses are most of what we do here, from small core cottages to ranch houses sitting on acreage. We price a house elevation by elevation, which means one side of the building is a real unit of work, priced on its own. If you would rather do the two worst walls this year and the rest next year, ask and we will book it that way.

An inspection is a look at your walls booked to a date, before anything has leaked. What it produces is a written list of what we found, put in priority order, so you can see what needs doing this year and what can wait. That order is the useful part when you are deciding a year's spending, and it is worth having long before you are selling. It also keeps a quote honest. A scope covering a whole elevation, priced before anyone has looked closely at the base of the wall, is a guess, because the bottom few feet are where the condition of the wall shows first.

Repair puts one damaged area right and leaves the rest of the wall alone. We cut back to material that is still sound, and where the lath behind it has rusted through we put new lath in before any plaster goes back. Where a crack is still moving, it gets an elastomeric sealant, a flexible joint material meant for a single line, where a coating spreads across the whole face of a wall. Then the texture is worked back in over the patch so the repair sits down into the wall. A sound wall with one bad area does not need recoating, and a repair is often the right answer for years before anything larger is.

When a wall is past repairing, it comes off and goes back new. We tear off one elevation at a time so your building is never open all the way around. With the plaster down we can see the sheathing, the boards or panels that close the framing, and the framing itself. A new water-resistive barrier and new lath then go on before the coats start again. Pre-1980 construction gets tested for asbestos and lead before anything is disturbed. A good deal of the housing around Palermo is old enough for that to come up, so treat it as part of the job rather than an exception.

Remediation deals with water that has gotten in behind the wall, which is a different problem from damage you can see on the face of it. We map where the moisture is before anything comes off, then check how the layers of the barrier overlap and how the flashing is set at windows, doors and the base of the wall, flashing being the metal that catches water at those joints and sends it back out, since water that gets past those points has nowhere to go. Where mold is visible, a qualified independent specialist handles that assessment, because testing and removal are their own trade. The finish goes back on only once the way in has been closed.

The same crew works on small commercial and institutional buildings, and you get the work you would get on a house: the same coats, the same detailing around the openings and at the base of the wall, over a bigger area. The buildings in Palermo are small enough that one scope usually covers the whole exterior instead of a contract running in stages, and they are booked in the same seasons a house is. Where you would rather spread the cost, we phase it the same way.

Manufactured stone veneer is plastering work, not masonry: the stone is set over lath and a scratch coat, never glued onto a wall that is already finished. Full-thickness natural stone is a separate trade and we do not take it on. Around here it usually goes on the lower part of a house that has stucco above it, as a wainscot, a band of facing across the lower part of the wall, or on column bases and porch piers. The join between the two is where the care goes, detailed so water runs off and leaves the wall instead of standing on the ledge where the stone stops.

We plaster the exterior surfaces that are not house walls: garden and site walls, chimneys, parapets where a low wall carries the roofline past the edge of the building, and the undersides of eaves and porch ceilings. They take the same cement and lime plaster the house wall does. A large parcel usually has several of them, and we quote them with the house when they stand on the same ground.

On a house that is still being built we work to the builder's schedule. The lath goes up and then work stops for the inspection that has to happen before anything covers it. That pause is the hold point, and we coordinate it with the general contractor and sequence the flashing and the barrier with the trades working alongside us. New houses here go up one at a time on separate lots, not in tract phases, so that is one schedule and one builder to hold to.

Decorative work is the architectural detail on a wall: foam trim, bands, sills and window surrounds, along with arches and columns, corbels, the brackets set under an eave or a shelf, quoins, the blocks that step up a building's corner, reveals, the recessed edges around an opening, and score lines, the shallow grooves cut into a finish to break up a large panel.

Each piece is coated as part of the wall rather than stuck onto a finished face, which is what keeps it from parting from the wall at its edges later.

Resurfacing puts a new finish coat over a wall that is structurally sound. This is a redash, a plaster coat with body and texture of its own, not a paint film laid over what is there. It is the answer for a wall that has been patched several times across twenty years and now shows every one of those repairs, because a coat with body covers their edges where a film only follows them. You pick the texture and the color from a sample panel we put up on your wall first, so you are looking at the finish in your own light before the whole elevation goes ahead.