Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 11 80% done

In the last blog I had mentioned that I threw my back out which was two weeks ago.  I thought I would be stuccoing again in one week but I decided to give myself another week of rest by doing light work.   That light work was painting the trim blue.

Well I was looking forward to using my Wagner paint/stain sprayer.   But when preparing for it I figured out pretty quickly that it was the wrong way to go.  The problem is that the sprayer requires extensive covering of the walls, sofit and roof with plastic and drop clothes.  What makes matters worse is the stucco does not lend itself to tape sticking to it very well and then wind doesn't help either.  Furthermore the trim is a small area and the sprayers are better for walls.

In this case the paint brush and roller was the way to go and I returned my sprayer and got my 100 bucks back.  With the brush and roller the painting was a breeze.  I'm really happy with the end result shown below:

The next weekend I turned to stuccoing the wall where the cedar porch is.   The protecting of the porch with plastic took about 10 hours whereas the actual stuccoing took 2 hours.  The challenge was that the surface was oily and tape did not stick well too it.   Especially when tape is expected to hold large sheets of plastic to the surface and there is wind.   However, I figured out a good way to hold the plastic on.   The first step was to use 1 foot pipe clamps to clamp a large sheet of plastic to the rafters on the underside of the porch.  

Once that was in place, I could use stucco poly tape to tape other pieces of plastic to the clamped plastic.  This is because the poly tape sticks to plastic so good.  This enabled me to cover the entire underside of the cedar porch with two sheets of plastic.   And it got very windy and still held.

 After wrapping the columns with plastic, all that remained was the ledger.  For the ledger I decided to use the green masking tape (which is made for hard to stick on surfaces) on the ledger and then stick the plastic on top of that with stucco poly tape.  This method worked well.

After the drop cloths were put on the patio floor, I smurfed the walls with bonding agent. 

Then I stuccoed them with white finish coat using the hopper.   The end result is shown here.

With the covering of the cedar porch wall with stucco, I have only one more two story wall left to do.  In the next blog find out how much I saved by doing this work myself.

That's all for now,

Happy Building.

The Dr.