Stucco Repairs on older homes

Shearer Painting: This is a 90 year old home on Queen Anne, and most of the houses on this side of the lake are 50+ years old, and been around a long time and they have seen their better days. This particular job we had some easier repairs; This and the light carpentry. Easy to match and also an old front porch all concrete that was started to show some wear, some splitting, some cracking that we were able to just…Interview Speaker: You did Stucco repair on that?

Shearer Painting: We did concrete repair on that, yeah. The bigger repair was on the Stucco on the garage. It’s a separate building from the house and it sits on the alley. Somebody had ran into the corner with the car… maybe something… and severely damaged the corner completely crushed it. If it was on the side of the building, right in the center it’s one thing, it’s a lot easier to repair just a flat spot. This was a corner where they had damaged the integrity of the metal backing and all of that had to be addressed.

One of the most difficult things with Stucco repair is getting the new material to adhere to the old material, and we took some steps to make that happen. One was actually grooving the existing Stucco after we had gotten down to a usable substrate; cleared out all the paint with a grinder, and really just dug in there to get something that we could stick to.

Now, we used some bonding agents in the concrete as opposed to mixing it with water. That is basically like a glue, it brings the two together and makes for a faster grind repair as well so that our crew can come in and paint it.

The most difficult part was matching it aesthetically, and making sure that somebody who came along wouldn’t be able to notice that that spot had been repaired. I mean, that’s what we want to do with these old homes. We want to make repairs that will match exactly as we can to the original texture. In this case of the Stucco.

Interview Speaker: How did you get that done?

Shearer Painting: There is specialty tools for doing Stucco texture. A lot of people use a hopper to do a full side of a building, but when you just have a small section you don’t want to go and bring piece of equipment, and use up a lot of material, and make a big mess. We used basically a texture brush, and I did some research on Stucco textures and practiced in the shop, make sure I was able to get a match to it… and just went for it and we got a completely flawless repair on that job.