Addition · Melbourne, FL
Brick entry refinished in stucco in Melbourne
The painted-pink brick around the front entry was dated and ready to go. We covered the brick in smooth stucco and built a clean stone-look arch surround around the door. The spindles and flagstone stayed — everything else got a fresh face.
Service performed: New Construction & Additions
Where we work: Stucco repair in Melbourne
Brick is a substrate, not just a look
Look at the before photo and you can still count the courses. Painted brick, mortar joints readable straight through the paint, and a ring of brick turned over the doorway to make the arch. All of that is relief, and relief is the first thing a new coat has to deal with.
Brick will carry plaster. The paint on it is the question. The trade guidance is blunt about not assuming fresh cement will grab somebody else's paint film, and the standard's own list of answers for a face that will not bond runs a bonding agent, a dash coat, a roughened surface, or lath fastened back into the masonry. Which one a given wall gets is decided at the wall.
A curve shows every wobble
The after photos show a stone-look surround built around the opening: wedge-shaped blocks running up and over the arch, a square block at each point where the curve springs, and a plinth at the foot of each leg. The joints between the pieces are cut, not painted on.
Work like that is shaped while the material is still green, because a curve gives you nowhere to hide. A straight line can be out by a hair and nobody will ever know. An arch that is out by a hair reads as a dent from the driveway, and the shadow under the soffit finds it every afternoon.
Building around the parts that stay
Two things in the before photo are still there in the after. The turned terracotta spindles either side of the door, and the flagstone underfoot. The surround was built to them rather than over them: the new blocks land above and below each spindle and leave it sitting in a clean pocket.
That is most of the work on an entry. A porch is a small space full of things you cannot easily put back — stone paving, a threshold, a soffit line that has to stay straight across the top of everything. Whatever does not get masked has to be cleaned, and cement on flagstone does not wipe off once it has taken hold.
Cracked, bulging, or just looks tired?
Send a photo or have Tony come take a look. The estimate is free.