Professional Stucco Services

Fine hairline cracking is normal in stucco and is not usually a structural problem — it comes from ordinary movement and from the material curing. Cracks that are wide, that step diagonally from a window or door corner, or that keep reopening after repair are a different matter and usually point to movement in the structure or the substrate underneath. We work out which you have before selling you a recoat that will crack again.

Usually, and it is genuinely a skill rather than a product choice. Matching a texture that has weathered for twenty or forty years is a different job from matching it new — the finish has faded, the aggregate has worn, and a perfect fresh match will read as a patch. We test on a sample area and get you to look at it before committing to the elevation.

Traditional three-coat stucco is applied in scratch, brown and finish coats over lath, and is the more robust system. One-coat systems are applied in fewer passes over foam board and go on faster and cheaper. Both are used across Arizona. Which is appropriate depends on the substrate, the exposure and what is already on the building — we do not have a single house answer.

It varies with exposure, colour and the coating used. West and south elevations in Arizona take far more ultraviolet than north-facing walls, so a house rarely wears evenly and often needs one elevation attended to well before the rest. Elastomeric coatings hold up better against that exposure than standard paint and bridge fine cracking, at higher cost.

Yes, and stucco over masonry block is extremely common in older Phoenix-area housing. It is a different preparation from stucco over frame and lath — the block has to be sound and properly prepared, and a coating applied over a wall that is holding moisture will fail regardless of how well it goes on.