San Diego

Like other cement products, stucco is prone to cracking. It will shrink when it dries and these stress movements will cause cracks to doors and window corners among other sections. These cracks interfere with the appearance of your building and may lead to water seepage that can damage the interior structure. 

Two types of stress can cause your stucco to crack and these include internal and external stresses. Internal stresses result from stuccos’ natural properties such as shrinking and drying. External stress refers to faulty constructions and weather conditions. To avoid them, you need a highly specialized expert like San Diego Stucco and EIFS Repair Services to work on your stucco surfaces.

The internal stresses that lead to cracking include shrinking cracks. As stucco settles down and dries, it will result in tiny cracks on the finishing coat. The cracks won’t have a bad look unless they go beyond 1/32 of an inch. Shrinking can also come from faulty stucco applications such as a varying thickness in the mixture of stucco, and windy and hot weather conditions during the application process.

Stud cracks are the vertical fissures that result from the external vibrating of machinery, heavy traffic, and continuously forcefully shutting windows and doors. Map cracks appear like road maps and originate from dimensionally unstable sheathing substrate movements like the stucco structure and plywood.  Thermal cracks result from drastic and sudden temperature changes. You notice them by radial cracks and concentric circles out from the center. Some of them will appear as cracks that were induced by a hammer.

Structural cracks are large open cracks across the surface of your stucco. Most of these cracks are directional. A single warped stud can cause stress leading to a vertical cracking along the stud. You can also notice a deflection crack that is a horizontal crack that runs through the plane of your wall. A diagonal cracking from any square corner that runs throughout the wall plane is the deflection. A re-extract crack is a diagonal cracking from the edges of different squares such as windows.

A Yearly whitewash of stucco is the most common repair work for minor cracks or hairlines. The lime that is present in the whitewash will harden the stucco and also fill the hairline fissures and hence prevent any form of water seepage. You can also coat your stucco building with oil mastic or paraffin to render it highly waterproof. 

For cracks that are larger than 1/8 of an inch, you can repair them by brushing a bonding agent coat. You have to apply the acrylic mixture and Portland cement mixture over the whole surface.  Apply an additional brush coat with a Portland stucco cement finish on the same day. Don’t attend to tiny stucco damages with immediate effect because new cracks emerge over time and you will keep in repairing them. If the cracks are not too large, you can restore your stucco after two years.

Stucco tends to crack, and you can minimize this by adding a base coat finish and mesh of fiberglass before you install the finish coat. The process is costly, but you will avoid cracking in the future hence minimize stucco repair. Steel reinforced foundations, compact soil, high-quality framing without moisture dry lumper, the correct stucco installation, and proper sheaths spacing are critical if you want to prevent cracking. San Diego Stucco and EIFS Repair Services lead the market when looking for stucco repair services.