Water-Damaged Stucco Repair in Phoenix

How to tell water damage from a crack

These signs point to water:

• Stucco that sounds hollow when you tap it, which means it has come loose from the wall behind it
• Bulging or bubbled areas
• Crumbling or soft stucco near the ground, a downspout or a sprinkler head
• Brown or rust-colored stains running down from a crack
• White, powdery deposits on the surface, left behind as water moves through the cement and dries

If it's hollow, bulged or crumbling, it's not a surface patch.

What's behind the stucco

A stucco wall is built in layers. A water-resistant paper goes on the sheathing first, then a wire lath, then a base coat, then the textured finish. Some Valley homes have traditional three-coat stucco, and others have a thinner system over foam board. The paper is the waterproofing. The stucco is the armor over it. When water gets through a crack and the paper is intact, it drains out the bottom. When the paper is torn or rotted, water reaches the sheathing and the framing.

What the repair involves

Damaged stucco gets cut back to sound material. If the paper or lath behind it is torn or rusted, that gets replaced too, and new paper gets lapped over the old so water runs out, not in. Then the base coat and the finish coat get rebuilt and textured to match the wall. A patch has to follow whatever system the wall already has, or it cracks around the edges.

If the sheathing behind the stucco is soft, that gets replaced before the paper goes back on. That's still a repair, but it's a bigger one, and the quote says so.

The weep screed

Along the bottom of most stucco walls there's a metal strip called a weep screed. It has small holes that let water that got behind the stucco drain out. When dirt, gravel, mulch or a concrete patio gets built up over it, water stays trapped in the wall. That's why stucco so often fails along the bottom few inches, and why the first thing we do on a bottom-of-wall repair is dig the screed out and keep it clear. The gravel needs to stay a couple of inches below it.

Sprinklers, downspouts and grading

Water damage has a source, and if the source stays, the repair fails the same way. A downspout that dumps at the base of the wall gets an extension. Soil that slopes toward the house gets regraded away from it. We'll point out the cause, and it's usually a simple fix.

Problems we fix on this page

• Hole in the stucco
• Hole from an old satellite dish
• Holes from removed light fixtures
• Stucco crumbling at the bottom
• Stucco bulging
• Stucco sounds hollow
• Stucco damaged by sprinklers
• Water stain running down from a crack
• White powder on the stucco
• Stucco chipped by a car or mower

How it starts

Send a photo of the damaged area and one from a few feet back showing the ground at the base of the wall. Tap the area and tell us whether it sounds hollow. We send back a fixed price, you say go, and Levi shows up to do it.