I'm a little Stuc Up!

I noticed the stucco next to our front door was buckling a bit and starting to fall off of the wall.  I applied duct tape over the cracks until I could get it repaired.

 

I called four different stucco repair companies and finally got someone to come out to take a look.  A very nice man looked over my problem and promised to email me a quote.  That was the last time I heard from him.  I emailed and called multiple times but was never able to get him to respond. I couldn't get any of the other stucco repair folks to return my call either. I have a handyman who can do almost anything so he came out to see if he could handle the repair.  He said it was too much for him.

So, left with no other options, I started watching YouTube videos on stucco repair.  I went to Home Depot and bought metal lath and powdered stucco mix.  I enlisted Tony's help to apply the lath.  First we broke off all of the loose stucco.

Uh oh!  This was going to be a bigger project than I had anticipated!  We considered making another front door, but decided that would look odd!

I wanted to square up the hole like I had seen on the YouTube videos but thankfully Tony vetoed that idea.  He thought we shouldn't make the hole any bigger than it already was. We attached the metal lath using lath screws, making sure every area was covered with lath.

 

Then it was time to mix the stucco.  Tony loves his power tools so he hooked up the paint stirrer to the drill to stir the stucco.  We mixed the stucco in the garage and then by the time we carried it to the front porch, it had hardened into a bucket-sized chunk of concrete. We decided that we would only mix a small amount at a time and still, it hardened before we could get it on the wall.

The sun boils down on our porch in the afternoon and that made the stucco harden even faster so I started applying a small bucket of stucco every morning.  It was slow work.

Tony did some Googling and found that adding lime to the stucco mixture would cause it to harden slower.  This helped a lot and I was able to apply 3 small buckets of stucco every morning after that.

I think it took me about 2 weeks to get the entire hole covered with stucco. Of course I had to go on vacation for a few weeks to give the stucco plenty of time to dry. :)  When I got home, I mixed up one more bucket of stucco and put on some final touches.

We had some paint left over from the last time we had the house painted.  We got out the drill and the paint stirrer and mixed it up.  Even painting was slow-going, but I finally got it covered.  The paint didn't exactly match so I had to paint the entire wall.  When it dried, it matched a lot better.

Voila!  Good as new! This was a difficult and time consuming project and I now understand why no one would call me back!