You have cracks. One contractor says patch them for a few hundred dollars. The next says the whole house needs re-stuccoing for five figures. Both of them looked at the same wall.
The gap is real, and it is not always someone trying to oversell you. Patching and re-stuccoing fix different problems, and the wall tells you which problem you have if you know what to look at.
Here are the five checks we run on every repair call in the Valley, and what each answer means for your money.
Check 1: where the cracks are, not how many
Homeowners count cracks. We look at the pattern instead, because location tells you the cause.
Cracks running at 45 degrees off the corners of windows and doors are normal. Those four points are where stress collects when a wall expands in 110 degree heat and shrinks overnight. Almost every Arizona home over five years old has them, and they are patch work.
Cracks in a fine web across the open part of a wall are different. That pattern says the finish coat itself is shrinking or failing. Patch it and you chase new lines every season.
Corner cracks off openings
Normal movement. Seal, texture match, and coat. This is repair territory.
Web or map cracking across a field
The finish coat is failing. Patches will keep appearing next to your patches.
One long horizontal crack
Worth a closer look. This can follow a framing line or a failed joint rather than surface movement.
Check 2: tap the wall and listen
This is the check almost nobody does, and it is the most useful one.
Knock across the wall with your knuckle. Solid stucco gives a dull thud. Where the coat has let go of the layer behind it, you get a hollow ring, and that hollow area is usually much larger than anything you can see.
A hollow patch the size of a dinner plate is a repair. Hollow spots spread across a whole wall mean the bond has failed. Patching does not fix a wall that is letting go from behind.
Tap the low areas too. Hollow at the base of a wall almost always means water has been sitting there.
Check 3: look at the bottom of the wall
The weep screed is the metal strip along the base of your stucco. Its job is to let water out of the wall.
Stucco absorbs water. It is designed to. Whatever soaks in runs down the weather barrier and drains out at that screed. When the screed is painted over, buried under a patio pour, or covered by soil and gravel, that water has nowhere to go and it stays in your wall.
A blocked screed turns up often on the water damage calls we run. If yours is buried, that is the real repair. Re-stucco over it and you get a nicer wall with the same problem inside.
Check 4: how much of the house is affected
Walk all four elevations, not just the one that bothers you.
Damage on the west and south walls with clean north and east walls points at sun exposure, and that is normal wear on the hard sides of a desert home. You treat those two walls and leave the rest alone.
The same damage on all four sides points at the original job. A finish coat that went on too thin, over dust, or in heat too high to cure fails everywhere at once. That is a re-stucco.
Cost follows the same logic. Patching two elevations beats re-stuccoing four every time. Patching all four repeatedly does not.
Check 5: run the five year math
This is the part that settles most arguments.
Add up what patching costs you now, plus the coating the wall will want, plus the patches you are realistically going to call about again in year two and year four. Then compare it to one re-stucco.
A repair and coating package on a couple of elevations comes in well under a full re-stucco, and if your wall passed checks 1 through 4 it will hold for years. That is the easy call.
But when you are patching the same house every spring, you are paying for a re-stucco in installments and never getting one. At that point the bigger number is the cheaper number.
Repair makes sense when
Cracks are at corners, the wall sounds solid, damage is on one or two elevations, and the base of the wall drains.
Re-stucco makes sense when
The wall is web cracked. Big areas sound hollow, all four sides look the same, or you are on your third round of patches.
If your wall lands in the middle, that is normal. Plenty of homes need one side re-stuccoed and the other three patched and coated. No rule says the whole house gets the same treatment.
We walk every elevation before we quote, and we will tell you when the smaller job is the right one. Call 602-583-4683 and we will come look at it.
