Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 3 stucco practice

In the previous blog I detailed the preparation of the house exterior for stucco.  I did not prepare the entire house exterior since I really wanted to get the front of the house done first so that the paver's that I will be installing wont get ruined.  They haven't arrived yet.

In this blog I describe my experiences with practicing applying stucco.

I only spent 1.5 hours this weak practicing.  That's because the grant seafood festival was in full swing this weekend and I really needed some fried oysters.

 

And don't forget the lobster roll, mmmm so good.

Anyway since I am learning how to stucco, I have watched a number of videos on stuccoing.  A few videos I ran across that were interesting are video video  and this video.  Here is a bonding agent video.   I also read about stucco colors at this link  and this is an interesting how to link.  I also got two books off of amazon.com (link and link) which are good and have a few details that are not on the internet but probably not necessary to have bought them.
  
My house has 2500 sq ft of wall and since one bag of white finish stucco covers 76 square feet or 33 bags is needed I decided  to buy a cement mixer to make the mixing process easier.   The one I bought can be found at northern tool at this link.  It is common to read that a mortar mixer should be used to mix stucco.  But the $250 cement mixer is a lot cheaper and I have found it works good.

Assembling the cement mixer was time consuming.  Getting the customer to do that job must save the manufacturer a lot of money.  To top it off, there were bolts missing, the seal was broken in the box and the directions were full of errors causing me to make errors in assembly steps.  But the mixer works well mixing stucco....very happy with it.  Here is a pic with the stucco being mixed  in it.

 

            

So to practice stucco I bought a bunch of stucco tools.  I bought a smooth darby, serrated darby, a hawk, a hard rubber float, two red sponge floats, a soft yellow sponge float  and  a dash brush.  I also bought the cheapest sheet of orientated strand board (osb) to stucco.   After mixing the stucco I applied it to the wood board with my steal trowel and then ran over it with the smooth edge darby.  So glad I bought the darby, it was pretty easy to get the surface flat with it.  Although I see kirk apply finish coat without a darby so maybe I need some more practice.

My first attempt at stuccoing a wall is shown below:

  

I didn't quite cover the whole sheet of wood with one 80 pound bag.  I must have put it on thick and at this rate it would require 80 to 100 bags to stucco the house.  Hopefully, I can spread it thinner because it is $14 a bag.

Also it dried very white and I am now thinking about getting some off white colors to make the white more appealing.

Next I tried all the floats I had.  I liked the wet sponge float effect the best.  It seemed to leave streak marks so went over it with a dry red sponge float.  The combination looks good an the effect of the float seams to  lighten the stucco up and fill in all the small holes making it look as if it were painted.  Here is a video about using a sponge float.

Next weekend the dash brush will arrive.  And I will give the knock down dash texture a try.  Also I hope to experiment with different colors of white. 

I also read about some texture machine methods that looked interesting.   One is the hopper used in conjunction with an air compressor (the air compressor requirements seem to make this not feasible for me) at this link,  The other is a Gracco texture machine available for rent at home depot at this link.   I don't think I'll use any of these but I always have the option to go over the whole house with these if I choose once I'm done.  I think it is important to have a smooth flat surface with these machines and there advantage is that they are fast.

That's all for now,  See what texture I chose in the next blog.

Happy Building,

The Dr.