Hiring

How to Hire a Stucco Contractor in Florida

Most of what protects you on a stucco job happens before anyone touches your wall. Here is how to verify a licence and insurance yourself, read a scope, and check references that actually apply to your house.

Two facts to establish before anything else

Hiring stucco work in Florida is a paperwork problem before it is a craftsmanship problem. Anyone can put a magnet on a truck door. The work happens outside, up a ladder, with wet material, and most of what you are paying for is buried under the finish coat by the time you can look at it. So the checks that protect you have to happen early, not after the crew has left.

Two of them are facts rather than opinions. A licence you looked up yourself, and insurance you saw on paper from the insurer. Everything further down this page is judgement and preference. Those two take about fifteen minutes and they rule out the situations that turn into real money.

Scale the rest to the job. A two square foot patch near your hose bib does not need three references and a spreadsheet. A full elevation of removal and rebuild on a two story house in Palm City does.

Look the licence up yourself

The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, usually shortened to DBPR, licenses construction contractors statewide and runs a public licence search on its website. You can put in a person or a business name and see whether the licence exists, what it covers, whether it is current, and whether anything has been filed against it. A photo of a licence card on somebody's phone tells you none of that. Search it yourself while they are standing in your driveway if you like. It is a normal thing to do.

Two details matter for plaster work specifically. What a licence permits is written into the licence category, not into the trade name on the truck, so ask what category it is and what that category covers. And local registration and permitting are handled separately from state licensing. Port St. Lucie, Fort Pierce, Stuart and unincorporated St. Lucie County each run their own building department, so ask which one will issue the permit if the job needs one, and in whose name it will be pulled.

If anyone suggests you pull the permit yourself as the owner to save time or money, slow down. That arrangement moves responsibility for the work onto you.

• Search DBPR yourself rather than accepting a copy of anything
• Check the licensed name matches the name that will be on your contract
• Confirm the licence is current and read any disciplinary history shown
• Ask which building department issues the permit and whose licence it goes under

Insurance, and why the certificate should come from the agent

Ask for two things. General liability, and workers compensation if anybody other than the owner will be on your property. Then ask for the certificate to be sent to you directly by the insurance agency, with your name and address on it as certificate holder. Contractors here get that request weekly and good ones make one phone call. A certificate that arrives from the agency is accurate the day it arrives. A file forwarded from a phone might be a year old or cancelled.

Workers compensation gets complicated in Florida construction, because it is possible for an owner to hold an exemption covering themselves. An exemption covers one person, not a crew of four. If it comes up, ask plainly who else will be on the ladder and what covers them. When someone gets hurt on an uninsured job, the argument about who pays happens at your address.

This is not a formality in stucco. The daily risks are ladders and lifts, scaffold near a tile roof edge, wet material on a pool deck, and a pressure washer working next to windows and screens.

A written scope beats a low number

The price is a summary of the scope. It carries no information on its own. Two contractors looking at the same east wall can mean fill the cracks and roll a coating over them, or take the failed material off back to sound stucco, rebuild the coats, and finish the elevation corner to corner. Both of those are real, defensible jobs. They are not the same job, and the gap between the prices is mostly the gap between the work.

So get the scope in writing before you look at any total. Which walls. How much area and how it was measured. What is coming off, what goes back, how many coats. How the texture is matched. What is excluded. Once you are holding that from two or three contractors, the numbers finally mean something and you can pick on more than price.

A line that reads stucco repair as needed followed by a total is not a scope. It is a number with the job attached later, and later is where the disagreements live.

References for the same kind of work

References are worth asking for and worth very little if you take them generically. A crew that produces flawless new construction finishes in Tradition may almost never open a 1960s frame and lath wall in Fort Pierce, and the crew that lives in those old walls may not be who you want spraying a new subdivision finish. Ask for addresses where the work matched yours.

Ask when each job was done and lean toward the older ones. Fresh stucco looks perfect on day one regardless of who applied it. A wall that has been through two summers of afternoon storms and a hurricane season has actually been tested.

When you call, skip the general question about whether they were happy. Ask what happened when the crew found something they did not expect. Ask whether the schedule held. Ask whether you can tell from the street where the repair is, which is the only texture review that counts.

• Same substrate: block, frame with wire lath, or a foam band detail
• Same scope: crack repair, a full elevation, a resurface, or new install
• Same access problem: two story, pool cage, tile roof edge, tight side yard
• At least a year old so the finish has been through a wet season
• Close enough that you can drive past and look at the wall yourself

Find out who actually does the work

The person who measures your walls is often not the person who trowels them. That is normal in this trade and it is not a problem by itself. The problem is finding out on the morning the truck arrives. Ask whether the crew is employed by the company or subcontracted, who supervises them day to day, and how often that supervisor is physically at your house.

Then ask who you talk to once work starts. Stucco jobs throw off decisions in the middle of the day. Somebody sounds a soft area two feet past where the removal was supposed to stop, or the texture sample reads differently in afternoon sun than it did on the board. With a clear person to ask, that is a twenty minute conversation. Without one, your wall sits open while messages get relayed.

It is also fair to ask how many jobs the crew is running that week. Stucco has waiting built into it, because coats need time before the next one goes on, so crews stack work on purpose. Stacked too thin and your house becomes the Friday stop.

A sane order to do it in

Homeowners usually run this backwards. They collect three prices first, then try to work out afterward what each price was for. Reverse it. Decide who is qualified, get comparable scopes from those people, and let the price be the last thing you look at rather than the first.

The whole sequence below costs you a few phone calls and one evening. On a job of any size it is the cheapest hour you will spend, and it is worth doing even if you already know who you want to hire.

• Shortlist two or three contractors who work on houses like yours
• Verify each licence on the DBPR search before anyone comes out
• Have each one walk the wall, sound it, and put the scope in writing
• Ask the two you like for agent issued insurance certificates
• Call references for the same kind of work, done a year or more ago
• Compare scopes side by side, then price, then who can start when
• Sign a contract naming scope, schedule, payment steps and warranty