Storm season

A Pre-Season Stucco Checklist for Treasure Coast Homeowners

Forty minutes in April is worth more than a week of worry in September. Here is what to look at on a Treasure Coast stucco wall before hurricane season starts, and what you can honestly leave alone.

Do this in spring, not in the first week of June

The Atlantic hurricane season runs June through November, and the NOAA National Hurricane Center is where the Treasure Coast watches it from. That is a useful date to work backward from. By the time a name shows up inside a forecast cone, the window for calm wall work has already closed.

So the walk happens in March, April or early May, which is dry season here. Sealant cures under good conditions, a patch has time to sit and be painted, and crews across Port St. Lucie, Fort Pierce and Stuart are not yet buried in emergency calls.

None of this needs to be dramatic. Most houses turn up two or three small items, and plenty turn up none. A checklist exists to find those, not to talk anybody into a project.

Walk the house slowly, with a notebook

Give it forty minutes. Start at a corner and go one direction so you do not skip an elevation. Early or late beats noon, because low sun rakes across a wall and shows every ridge, bulge and open joint that midday light hides.

You are not diagnosing anything on this walk. You are listing places where water has an easy path in, which is a far simpler job than working out what any given crack means.

• A phone, so you have a dated baseline to compare against in October
• A small screwdriver or putty knife for testing sealant
• Binoculars for gable ends and second story walls you cannot reach
• A note on your phone, one line per elevation, so nothing gets lost

Sealant joints fail first and cost the least to fix

Every place where stucco meets something that is not stucco is a joint, and that joint is only as good as the sealant in it. Window and door perimeters. Hose bibs. Dryer vents. The line set running through to the air handler. Light fixtures, house numbers, shutter hardware, anything screwed through a wall.

Failed sealant announces itself once you know the signs. It pulls away from one side and leaves a visible gap. It cracks across its face. It goes hard and chalky and lifts out with a fingernail. Under Florida sun a cheap bead on a west elevation can be finished in three or four years.

Test it with the screwdriver. Good sealant is rubbery and springs back. Failed sealant is brittle or already gone. Mark those spots, because a morning spent replacing bad joints is the highest value work anyone does on a wall before storm season.

• Window and door perimeters, all four sides, on every elevation
• Hose bibs, dryer vents, exhaust caps and electrical penetrations
• The line set and condensate penetration at the air handler wall
• Anything fastened through the stucco, including shutter tracks and bolts
• Control joints, and where the garage door frame meets the wall

The bottom of the wall, and what is buried against it

On a framed wall or a gable end, stucco goes over wire lath and terminates at a weep screed. That screed does what the name says. Water that gets behind the stucco runs down the drainage plane and exits through the holes along the bottom flange.

It only works if it is open to air. Soil pushed against it, mulch renewed every spring until the bed is four inches deep, a paver patio added years later, a planter run right up to the wall. All of them bury the escape route and turn it into a trap. Walk the base of every framed wall and pull that material back.

The rule of thumb is a few inches of clearance above soil and a smaller gap above paving. The number that governs your house is whatever your building department enforces, so ask St. Lucie, Martin or Indian River County before you rebuild a bed or pour a slab against a wall. On direct to block walls there is often no screed at all, and what matters is simply that the stucco is not buried in wet dirt.

Which cracks are worth closing before June

Not all of them, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something. A stable hairline in a flat wall field admits very little water, and storm season does not change that. It can wait for your next paint cycle.

What wind driven rain changes is the value of location. A crack next to a window corner, beside a penetration, at the top of a wall under the eave, or on the elevation your weather arrives from, is a crack with water aimed at it under pressure. Those move to the front of the list.

Priority also goes to anything a fingernail catches in, anything with brown staining bleeding out of it, and anything running unnaturally straight along an outside corner where the bead sits. Corroding metal does not wait for the dry season.

• Close first: cracks within a foot of a window, door or penetration
• Close first: anything wide enough to catch a fingernail on
• Close first: cracks with rust or brown staining running out of them
• Can wait: stable hairline and map cracking out in an open wall field

Where the water goes once it lands

A good share of what damages a stucco wall never arrives as rain on the wall. It arrives as splash. A downspout discharging at the base, a low spot that ponds against the foundation, a walkway settled back toward the house. All of them hold water at the bottom of the wall long after the sky clears.

So walk the ground line as carefully as you walked the wall. Grade should fall away from the house. Downspouts should let go well clear of the base. Irrigation heads should water plants rather than stucco, a common find in St. Lucie West and Tradition where the landscape went in before the plants filled out.

Look up too. On the barrel tile roofs common here, a blocked valley sends a lot of water onto one spot, and so does a roof edge that dies into a wall with no kick-out flashing at the end of it. Both are worth a roofer's eye while it is still dry.

• Grade falling away from the wall, with no ponding left after rain
• Downspouts discharging clear of the base, not into a bed at the wall
• Irrigation heads aimed at planting, never at the stucco
• Valleys, gutters and kick-out flashing checked before the season

What to do with the list you just made

Sort it into three piles. Things you can handle yourself, things worth a contractor, and things to watch. Most lists come out heavy on the first pile, which is why the walk is worth doing.

Cutting out a failed sealant joint and laying a new bead is homeowner work if you are steady on a ladder and buy a decent polyurethane or hybrid rather than the cheapest tube on the shelf. Pulling mulch off a weep screed is a Saturday morning. Resetting a settled walkway is a landscaper.

Call somebody when the list includes a hollow sound, a bulge, rust staining, or a crack that came back in the same line after a repair. Call in April rather than August. The week after a storm crosses the Treasure Coast, every crew from Vero Beach to Hobe Sound is booked, and a morning's work turns into a wait.