Refinishing Wood coated with Olympic Elite Woodland Oil: Yet another tangent,

In the last blog, I was able to continue stuccoing the house.   However, with 60% of the house stuccoed I was now ready to tackle the stuccoing in the cedar porch area.  But as I looked at the cedar porch it was obvious that it needed some touch up.  In the sun exposed areas the finish was showing light weathered look due to UV exposure and even a little graying.  It certainly did not have its original luster (see the former blog on the cedar porch at this link).  But in the sun covered shadowy areas it was still ok.   It actually was almost two years ago when I constructed the porch and put Olympic Elite Woodland oil on it.

Since applying the oil to the cedar usually gets oil on everything, including the walls and the cement pad,  I decided not to subject the new wall stucco to touch the cedar up in the areas that needed it before I had applied the stucco (This would be a double tangent for me as it puts off the stucco job which also puts off the paver driveway job).  Of course even when the new stucco is on the wall eventually I will have to re-coat the entire cedar porch with oil.

To determine if the Olympic elite woodland oil is ready to be reapplied , the manufacturer recommend throwing water on it.  Since it beaded up and didn't absorb the water, I could not refinish it according to the manufacturer.  So I decided to use the Olympic deck wash  and brightener on the weathered areas.   If you look at the MSDS you will find that wash has Ethanedioic and Phosphoric acid.  in it.  To apply the wash I used a sprayer .  The directions say to to wet the wood and apply the wash and wait 20 minutes and scrub with a nylon brush and then wash it off.  However, to my surprise the wood soaked the wash up within five minutes.  This made me realize the cedar porch was ready to take the woodland oil and my preliminary water test had been misleading

I used the wash on the ledger, the main beam, posts and outer rafters.  It did not seem to really be that great at cleaning the wood, but combined  with the pressure washer the wood did get clean.  Since the directions mentioned staining the wood after using the wash, I changed my course of action and proceeded to refinishing the washed wood with the oil.

First I covered up the walls and cement pad with plastic and then applied the oil to the cedar.   It went on very nice and looks great.  I decided the areas that are in the shadows and less weathered will be  refinished next year.

Below is a picture of some of the weathered wood although this is not the worst area.

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The refinished wood looks like this.

That's all for now,

Happy Building.

The Dr.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 9 back in business

In the last blog I mentioned I was out of business because the stucco sprayer broke.   Well the parts arrived and I'm back in business.  I stuccoed another wall making me 60% done with the stuccoing.  The results are shown in the pics below.

  

This time I completely disassembled the sprayer and cleaned off the stucco.

I have also started thinking about paint and have decided to paint the facia, drip edge, wood gable ends and doors blue.   I will never paint the stucco.  I bought some Sherwin Willianms weather shield paint which protects against cracking, mildew and algae.  It also can be applied to metal and wood.

Even though I have less than 400 square feet to paint, I also bought a Wagner airless paint gun for  the job. I figured it would make the job easy especially where the drip edge overlaps the facia.  I was set to do the paint job this weekend but it looked like it was going to rain so I pressure washed the back of the house instead.   

In the back is the cedar covered porch.   When I was pressure washing, I though that right before I stuccoed would be a good time to re-coat the cedar with oil since I don't want it to get on the new stucco.  FRo the most part it does not need it but there are a few areas (mostly the sun exposed areas) that do.  This means next weekend I will try out the Wagner paint gun with the oil.   It has a paint and stain setting.  Not what I originally envisioned using it for but I think its going to work out really nice.

That's all for now.

Happy Building,

The Dr

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 8 stucco sprayer broke

In the last blog I detailed an experiment that I was trying with the stucco sprayer.   In this blog I have no progress to really report.   Unfortunately, the stucco sprayer broke.  The reason it broke is that I was futzing around with it trying to get it to work.  There was to much dried residual stucco in the inner workings.  So after playing around with it the spray valve broke.   If I had known that I was supposed to disassemble it to clean it out this would not have happened.  Stucco is harsh material and I can see its hard problem to have a machine with fine parts have to work with it.  Anyway, I called the manufacturer and they are sending me two new valves free of charge.

In the mean time I cleaned out the stucco sprayer.  This is actually the first time I completely disassembled it.  I found harden stucco everywhere.  To get the stucco off I first tried distilled vinegar.  That seemed to work some what but it seemed to run out of cleaning ability so I switched to barnacle buster.   Barnacle buster has phosphoric acid in it.  This got most of the stucco off and some paint too.  I don't think it had an effect on the rubber o-rings,  There is another concrete dissolver known as mean klean which is gycolic acid based that is often used for chemical face peels,  I would have tried it but it is expensive and has to be ordered online in this area.  Here is a before and after picture:

Moral of the story is to clean the stucco out with water when it is wet.

Here is a pic that shows the state the house was left in before the sprayer broke.

There is good news though.   The pavers have arrived and they look great.

See what happens in the next blog.

That's all for now,

Happy building,

The Dr.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 7 half the house is stuccoed

In the last blog I stuccoed the front of the house with white base  finish coat.  I am very pleased with the results.  The texture of the stucco  and color of white base is very nice and all my neighbors have come by and complemented me on the appearance of the house and said it was a good job. It does help however that my house was a disaster area not to long ago which provides contrast.

This time around I have stuccoed half the house and it is very easy.

For this blog I would like to talk about a few new practices I'm doing.   First, my sprayer got so clogged, I had to take it apart.  The stucco was clogging the jets and I cleaned it with compressed air, water and a wire brush.   I also inserted a nail through the jet.  When doing this I realized it might be a good idea to take it apart and clean it after very use.  When I put it back together I put antiseize on everything that had threads.

Additionally I might have found out what causes the sprayer to get stuck on.   The jury is still out though until I finish the entire house.  The lever has a plunger that gets stucco in it.  Eventually all the grit interferes with the on off action and it gets stuck on.  To try to help with that I am experimenting with a protective boot on the plunger.  The perfect boot for this can be found on the brake pins of some cars.  Luckily they sell the boots separately at autozone and are called pin boots or brake hardware.  I actually had to use a pair of scissors to make them the right size but the end result is shown below:

So far the stuck on failure has not happened but I have only put two bags of stucco through it.

The other thing I'm doing differently is I invested in some protective wear and covers.  Since the over spray was larger than I expected when I prayed near the roof,  my roof got stuccoed a bit.  If it bothers me Ill replace the shingles in the area that got hit.  Not a big deal.  But it is stronger with stucco on it....maybe I should stucco my whole roof. :) 

For this time around I found some drop clothes at Lowes and covered things up with them.  Additionally I got a painters suit, more face shields, ear plugs and a respirator.  When I have all this on I look like an alien with a stucco sprayer for a weapon.

You can see a freshly stuccoed wall behind me.

I intend to stucco one more wall on the house and then switch back to the paver installation for the driveway since the pavers will be arriving next week.   This is great since I always like to quit a job when it is half done.  :)  Not really.  It will nag me incessantly until I finish it.

Anyway cant be more happy with the way its going for the exterior.  I'm thinking about getting into stuccoing for a profession.  Not really interested in doing houses though.  My focus would be expensive cars.  Anybody need their car stuccoed?  Ill do it for free. :)

That is all for now until the next blog,

Happy Building,

The Dr.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 6 applying the stucco

In the last blog I discussed colors that are available for stucco.  I chose not to color the stucco but use the white base finish stucco as the finish color.  Going by the color chart I determined that the stucco that the professional had done on the garage was white.

Turns out that was wrong.   I guess the color chart can be misleading.   On the garage the color is an off white and I'm not sure if this is because the white finish coat is so thin that the grey coat under it is showing through (or maybe the sponging for the sponge finish mixed the two coats together) or its actually colored.

In any I case I stuccoed the entire front of the house, about 750 square feet, during the weekend with white finish coat.  The color is extremely white and I  like it.  I even like the texture better than the sponge float texture the professionals had done on the garage.  Quite amazing since I had no stucco experience when I started and I had no help at all applying the stucco.

What made this possible is the texture sprayer that I used.   It essentially reduces stuccoing to an easy spraying process.  I was considering sponge floating the texture spray on the house but glad I didn't because it would have taken so long and the result was not as good as the texture sprayer result,

Before I started I did a little more wall prep.  The main column on the porch had a large crack in it.  I decided to mend it using elastopatch   This material should be used if your going to paint over it or in my case stucco over it.  This is because it is different color then stucco and even it isn't, when the stucco gets wet it will show.

First, I ran an angle grinder down the crack.  Unfortunately I could not find my masonry blade but the metal cutting blade did the job with some coaxing.  The I filled the crack with elastopatch.  Then I knifed away the excess.  And finally I dabbed it with a sponge float and wet rag to get back the original texture.

I only did one fill with the elastopatch and I recommend two, since it contracts and leaves a concave channel in the crack.

Other preparation included covering the garage door, the front door and porch up with plastic.  For the roof I found some old tar paper and put that down.  Plastic is too slippery for the roof.  The tar paper worked well.

After that I rolled some blue bonding agent on the house.  The bonding agent requires 2 hours to be ready for stuccoing.  It is nice that it is blue since I could tell where I missed a spot very easily.  Unfortunately it is only good for 24 hours and since my stuccoing spanned two days I had to apply some more the second day to be sure that it would work.  The end result is a blue smurf house shown below.

I have watched YouTube videos by kirk the stucco expert and he recommends diluting the bonding agent for the finish coat otherwise it will spider check which means it will crack a lot.  Since he uses a different bonding agent, I have no experience with the bonding agent I bought and the bonding agent says do not dilute I put it on full strength.  So I will see if I get spider checking as reported by kirk.

Leading up to the stuccoing process, I perfected the texture spraying process by practicing on plywood.  First, I figured out the amount of water needed to get the stucco to run through the funnel provided by the texture sprayer manufacturer.  It is precisely 6" of water in a Lowe's 5 gallon bucket per one 80lb bag of white finish coat stucco.  I marked the bucket and made a level spot on the ground so I would get a consistent amount of water.

This amount of water makes the stucco run though the funnel like the picture below:

With this consistency the spraying of the texture came out very nice.

Even though the stucco was very runny, it still clogged the gun quite often.   Sometimes the sprayer would stop spraying.  Other times the sprayer would get stuck on.  To correct this I would detach the air pressure hose and get a garden hose and spray water in the stucco nozzle while holding the sprayer upside down.  Then I would spray water through the pressure hose nipple and pump the trigger.  When I did this water would pulse out the stucco nozzle.  Doing this kept me going and enabled me to finish the job.

The end result is shown below:

Now that the front of the house is stuccoed, I am glad that the pavers are taking so long to arrive.  This down time enabled me to stucco the front of the house.  And form what I have seen the stucco gets everywhere,  I had some sample pavers lying several feet away from the spray area and they got ruined.

By the way when using the stucco sprayer make sure to use, a face shield, respirator, hat, ear plugs and cover your arms and legs.

I plan to wait until next weekend to rip off the plastic and reinstall the lights.  I might even paint the plywood under the garage eves.

Well that's all for now.  See some tips I came up with in the next blog.

Happy Building

The Dr.