Stucco Repair & Installation in Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, & Santa Monica

Most hairline cracks are cosmetic and come from normal settling, seasonal expansion, or tiny shifts in the framing. The ones worth opening up are wider than a credit card edge, run diagonally from a window or door corner, or have brown or white staining around them. Staining usually means water has gotten behind the wall, and patching over that without fixing the source just hides the damage for a season or two.

Yes, and texture matching is the part of this job that takes real skill. Dash, lace, sand, cat face, and smooth finishes all get worked differently, and the same texture can look different on a north wall versus a south wall because of the light. We mix sample boards and match them against your existing wall in daylight before we touch the repair area. Once it reads the same, we move onto the patch.

A small cosmetic patch can be a couple of days of work spread over the cure time. Larger repairs that need new lath, paper, and flashing run closer to a week before the surface is ready for primer and paint. We cannot rush the cure time. Painting over stucco that is still damp is how patches crack again within a year.

Fresh stucco needs to cure, usually a few weeks depending on the weather and how thick the coats are. Painting too early traps moisture inside the wall, and the finish comes out blotchy or starts bubbling. If we did the stucco work, we tell you exactly when it is safe to paint. If someone else did it, we test the moisture before we prime.

We do. Full re stucco, room additions, garage conversions, and new construction all get proper building paper, wire lath, and a three coat system, scratch, brown, and finish. We also tie the new work into the existing walls so the transition is solid and the texture reads consistently across the whole house.

Stains below windows are almost always water getting behind the wall at the window head, sill, or siding joint. The water runs down inside the wall and exits at the bottom, leaving a brown or white mark on the stucco. Patching the stucco without fixing the flashing, caulk, or drainage is a temporary fix. We find where the water is coming from and repair that first.

Yes. We handle both the stucco repair and the paint, so the patched area gets primed and the entire wall gets painted to blend in. Using the same crew for both means we control the texture, the cure time, and the color, and you do not have to coordinate a plasterer and a painter. The goal is for the repair to disappear once the job is done.