Chico Elite Stucco is a stucco contractor serving Willows, CA, with more than 15 years in this trade. We repair stucco, replace failed walls and inspect walls before work starts, so you can separate a surface flaw from a wall that needs deeper work.
Our crew handles stucco remediation where water has gotten in behind the wall, and we resurface, paint and recoat exterior finishes when the wall can stay in place. We work on houses, storefronts and institutional buildings alike, including stone veneer, decorative detail and interior plaster. On new buildings, we install portland cement plaster to the California Building Code.
Willows is the Glenn County seat and was incorporated in 1886, so the buildings here run older than most of what we work on. We work throughout Chico and Butte County, including Oroville and the ridge communities, and we also serve parts of Glenn and Tehama counties.
Call us at (530) 783-7384 or send the details through our quote form; we will look at your wall and price it at no charge.
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A price for an older wall should follow what the wall actually is, not a square-foot rate applied to its face. When a building has years of patching, coating or water marks on it, we look before quoting so the number reflects the wall in front of us.
We have more than 15 years of stucco experience and are licensed and insured. Our insurance includes general liability and workers' compensation.
Chico Elite Stucco puts the same job basics in writing before the work begins:
That written scope gives you the repair or finish in plain terms before materials are ordered. Buildings with decades of work already on them are the ordinary case for this crew rather than an exception we have to make room for. We are on old walls week after week, so a wall carrying several generations of finish is familiar ground and gets handled as routine.
Send photos or request a visit through our quote form, and we will respond about the wall you need priced. We also work in Corning, north of here.
Chico Elite Stucco offers fourteen stucco services for Willows buildings, and the age of the wall helps decide which one fits. A stucco contractor should separate paint, patching, replacement and plaster work before the job is named.
When your wall is sound and only the surface has gone tired, we give it color and weather protection with stucco painting and coatings. An acrylic coating is a paint film that sheds water and holds its color; an elastomeric coating is thicker and stretches over hairline cracking; neither one repairs loose plaster. Before you settle on a finish we check for chalking, the powder an old coating leaves on your hand.
Additions and rebuilt walls here usually go up beside much older work, and we handle the stucco installation on them to the California Building Code. A scratch coat is the first rough layer of plaster over the lath, and the coats above it are what you end up seeing.
On a house we work residential stucco from the side yard and the exterior wall, not only from the street face. Access and setup are priced with the wall. Rooms inside may still carry older plaster work, and we can take that on with the same crew.
Before you commit money to a wall, we can look at it first. In a stucco inspection we work by sounding, tapping across the face to hear where the plaster has let go, take readings with a moisture meter and study the wall base, then give you a written report you can hand to somebody else.
Where the damage can be cut back to sound material and sound lath, stucco repair is the answer and we take it. A wall carrying a stack of old patches gets read before another one goes in. We work the new patch to the pattern of the wall around it, and that texture match goes as far as the old finish allows.
Some walls have had their last patch. Stucco removal and replacement is what we do when another repair would spend your money twice: the wall comes off by elevation, meaning one whole side of the building rather than scattered spots, and we check what is underneath before specifying a new water-resistive barrier, new lath and new plaster.
Where the trouble sits behind the plaster instead of on its face, we treat the job as stucco remediation. We start with moisture mapping before opening anything, and we check flashing, the metal or membrane that moves water away from an opening, along with the lap direction behind it, since each layer has to shed onto the one below. Where mold is visible on an opened wall, a qualified independent specialist handles that assessment.
A storefront, a county office or an institutional frontage stays in use while we are on it, so we plan commercial stucco around the people inside the building. We set access dates to suit the building's own hours and work the frontage in the order those dates allow, and the written scope names that frontage before we start. Your staff and your customers then know which days the front of the building is being worked on.
Some elevations want both materials, and we set stone veneer and stucco on the same wall. Stone goes over lath and a scratch coat, never straight onto an old wall, so we check the backing before any stone is set.
Solid walls, garden walls, chimneys, parapets and the soffits over porches and patios all take stucco plastering, and we work them overhead as readily as upright. A parapet is the low wall standing up at the edge of a roof, and a soffit is the underside of an overhang. Solid masonry takes plaster differently from a framed wall, so we treat the two differently.
Infill lots put a new building among older neighbors, and we fit new construction stucco into the rest of the job rather than around it. We coordinate the lath inspection hold point with the general contractor, sequence flashing with the other trades, and phase elevations so the building is not opened all at once.
Bands, sills, window surrounds and score lines are decorative stucco, and we repair and replace them. Score lines are shallow grooves cut into the finish. We measure the profiles you already have before replacing anything, and architectural foam trim may suit a profile better than solid plaster.
Not every room wants drywall. We put interior stucco and plaster on inside walls in smooth, mineral plaster and hand-troweled finishes, mineral plaster being the kind bound with lime or cement rather than a synthetic, working the coats by hand so the wall carries texture and depth that a painted board cannot. We can also refinish a masonry or framed fireplace surround without rebuilding the surround itself.
Where the wall underneath is sound and the face is tired rather than failing, we can give it stucco resurfacing. A redash is the trade name for it: a new finish coat troweled over the existing wall, as against a coating, which is only a paint film on top of it. A fog coat, a thin spray of cement and color, can even the finish out afterward. Where the wall is moving or wet, we recommend another repair path instead.
Older walls can hide more than one wall under the finish you see from the yard. On a long-lived Willows building, a stucco contractor may find old coating, later patching, changed backing and repairs from different owners all on the same elevation.
An exploratory opening is a small cut in an inconspicuous place, usually where the repair will happen anyway. The opening shows the backing, the layers and whether the wall is sound in a way the face of the wall cannot. On a building put up before 1980, material is tested for asbestos and lead before anything is disturbed. In pre-1980 construction that asbestos and lead testing step limits what can be touched first.
The point is to settle the scope of the work before the wall is priced, because older walls can hide a different repair than the one the surface first suggests.
Successive owners often coat and patch over earlier work rather than remove every old layer. One elevation can carry several generations of finish at once, and the records do not say what any particular Willows wall is built up from. The age of the town tells you about its building stock as a whole, not about the wall on your own lot, so the year the street was laid out settles nothing about what your elevation is carrying.
Lath is the backing plaster keys to. On older walls it may be wood lath, metal lath or both on the same house where work was done at different times. The two do not take a patch the same way, so what turns up at the opening is what decides how far back the cut runs and which materials go in. We scope the repair to the layers and backing found in that wall, without assigning a decade to material the wall itself has not shown.
The places around Willows are separate communities, not districts inside the city. If your property sits out in one of the smaller settlements nearby rather than in town, Chico Elite Stucco can look at the wall there just as readily, and each place brings a different kind of building stock to the job.
Artois sits about five miles north of Willows on the former US Route 99W and had roughly 300 people at the 2020 census. A post office served the settlement from 1877 under an earlier name until the Artois name arrived in 1918, so some houses can be older than the name on the map. We use stucco repair where walls have already been mended and need the next patch cut back to sound material.
Bayliss sits about nine miles east-northeast of Willows. The community still has a volunteer fire department and a Carnegie library built in 1917 that remains open, which makes it a very small place with older public buildings still in daily use. Where the plaster under your finish is still sound, we can renew the face with stucco painting and coatings rather than rebuild the wall: we wash the surface down, make good the hairline cracking, and carry the new finish across the whole elevation so the color matches from corner to corner instead of showing where the patches went.
Glenn lies about ten miles east of Willows on State Route 45, on flat ground near the Sacramento River at about 98 feet. The settlement has its own post office and a Mennonite church serving farming families around it. A new outbuilding wall or a rebuilt elevation on a farm property needs a whole assembly rather than a coat over what is already there, and stucco installation is what we put on it: the backing, the lath and the plaster coats over them, with the flashing at openings sequenced as the wall goes up.
The center of town is small enough to walk across, and it holds working buildings and houses side by side, with open ground beginning not far beyond. That mix changes where we can stand, where materials can be placed and who needs the schedule before the wall is touched.
Older central lots often leave narrow side yards between two houses. A narrow gap decides where scaffold can stand and where it cannot, and the mixer and materials need ground that belongs to the property being worked on. Where a frame will not fit at all, the same elevation gets worked in narrower lifts off lighter staging, and material is carried in to the wall rather than set down beside it. We price access with the wall instead of adding it after the wall has already been measured.
At the edge of town, the same wall work may have open ground around it. That room changes the setup, but the wall still sets the work itself.
A public office, a storefront and a house can sit within a few blocks of each other in a county seat. Each wall has a different decision-maker, so commercial stucco planning may go through an owner or property manager rather than the person who uses the building each day.
On anything other than a house, access dates go to the owner or manager in advance. The same written scope comes back for a public office, storefront or house, with the wall and schedule named before work begins. If access on your building is the open question, our quote form is the place to describe it, and someone will come out to look at the gap before the wall is priced.
The build-up behind the finish cannot be read from outside. A small opening shows the lath and the layers around it. We make that opening good the same day, and we do it whether the larger job goes ahead or not.
The backing varies, and the build year alone does not settle it. A wall that age may carry wood lath, later metal lath or both in different places. The repair follows the wall that is actually there.
We can be firm about what has been seen and clear about what remains open. The parts that depend on an opening are named that way in the written scope. The number is confirmed once the opening is made.
Sometimes, but the answer depends on how much wall is still sound. Scattered patching that keeps returning usually means the cause was never found. Once the wall is sound, we can resurface the whole face with a new finish coat.
The parcel decides which counter reviews the work, not the mailing address. An address that reads Willows on the envelope can still sit outside the city limits, so the boundary is the thing to check rather than the postal town.
No. Willows and the towns around it are inside the area we serve, and we work the west side of the valley as well as Butte County. The estimate visit is one trip, not several.
A Willows estimate means someone stands in front of your wall, looks at the surface and the access around it, and sends back a written scope. Chico Elite Stucco does not price your wall from a phone rate alone.
Call or use our online form now for a free estimate. Reach Chico Elite Stucco at (530) 783-7384.
