Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 12 Finale

In the last blog I stuccoed the back porch wall and mentioned how challenging it was to cover up the entire cedar porch. In this blog I am proud to report that I have finished the stuccoing work.

For the last wall that was stuccoed, I rented a scaffold from home depot for $128 for a week.  This is because there is a wire attached to my house on this wall and I did not want to spend the time assembling and unassembling the scaffold I had bought to access the other side of the wire.  I figured that would be too demanding in the middle of stuccoing the house.  The dueling scaffolds are shown below after pressure washing.

The finished result is shown below,

Since all the stuccoing is done, it is time to tally up the cost and time spent.

The total number of hours I worked to stucco 2500 square feet of walls is 106. Since I have a full time job and only did the work on weekends the time spanned 4 months.

Hours   task
32.5      pressure wash
8.5        stucco practice
22         stuccoing
32.5      covering windows / eaves
10.5      bonding agent

It is interesting to note the time it takes to prepare the house for stuccoing is almost three times as long as it takes to stucco the house.

The total cost of the stucco project was $1162 which is detailed below

Dollars  Materials
386.63   stucco
15.22    plywood
86.18    tape
98.55    bonding agent
30.38    rollers
53.98    6 mil plastic
74.04   4 mil plastic
11.32   buckets
60        face shields
18.96   elasto patch
187.38 drop clothes
12        pin boots
128     scaffold

When I originally had the garage stuccoed, I also got an estimate to stucco the whole house.  The bids came in around 11 thousand dollars.  That means I saved a whooping $9800 or 89 %!

Cue the cash register sound!

Now its time to finish off the painting of the trim and then to move on to the paver driveway.

Happy Building,

The DR

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.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 10 another delay

In the last blog I had to take a tangent to refinish part of the cedar covered porch before stuccoing around it.   This was very successful and now I have experience with the maintenance of the woodland oil finish.

This time I made good progress but threw my back out so I had to delay the actual stuccoing of the wall with the cedar covered porch attached to it.   The injury happened when I bent over and  twisted my back and then pushed on something.  There were no big forces involved here just a awkward orientation.  In any case I have hurt my back worse before on the construction of the additions and unlike last time no one at work will suggest that I go to see a doctor after observing the pain I was in.  I expect to be stuccoing next weekend.

What I did accomplish was the finishing of the pressure washing of the side of the house that has the cedar porch on it.   Additionally, the covering up most of the things that needed to be covered (windows,  doors, eves, roof shingles and the cedar).   The covering up is very challenging here because the cedar porch is oily and tape has a hard time sticking to it.  But I am the point now, after 7 hours in very windy conditions, where I see a way to accomplish the necessary covering that needs to be done.

To accomplish the covering of the underside of the porch, I used some pipe clamps to fasten the plastic to the beams of the porch.  I hope the clamps don't leave indentations on the rafters but not to worried about since if it does it will add a little character.  Better that then having a clamp fall on my head because its loose.

Before I thought of the clamp idea I made some braces to hold sagging plastic up.  But I probably could have just used the clamps to get the job done. Below are some pictures of what I did below and above the porch.

In the picture of the cedar porch covering the ledger is not covered.  My plan is to cover that at the last minute and use the green painters tape that is advertised for hard to stick to surfaces at this link.  Not sure that this will work and I haven't actually seen the tape yet and tried it.  Alternatively I could use the red poly stucco tape which does stick to the oily surface but eventually falls off so its all about timing.  I experimented with residue free duct tape but that seemed to be worse than the poly tape.

That's all for now.

Happy Building,

The Dr.