Stucco Repair in Melbourne, FL
Cracks, bulges, water damage — we fix the stucco and blend the patch so you can't see it.
A crack you can catch a fingernail in. A stretch of wall that thumps like an empty box under your knuckle. A brown stain beneath a window that comes back every rainy season. Those are three different problems, and they do not get the same repair.
Almost everything that fails on a Brevard stucco wall fails because of water. The people who study wall assemblies in this state are blunt about it: stucco over block leaks, the paint on top of it leaks, and the block behind it leaks too. Once water is inside, the hollow cores of the block carry it sideways and down — which is why the damage you can see is usually not where the water got in.
So the first job is finding the way in. Then we cut out what has let go, bond the repair to material that is still sound, and finish it so the wall reads as a wall instead of as a repair.
Free estimateHow to read your own wall before we get there
Ten minutes with your hand and a flashlight will tell you most of it.
Start with width. Hold a credit card up against the crack. Thinner than the card — under about a sixteenth of an inch — and you are almost certainly looking at shrinkage or ordinary settling. Stucco is cement, sand and lime; it shrinks as it cures and it moves with the wall behind it. A crack that has reached an eighth of an inch, or that has visibly opened since last year, is a different conversation.
Then direction. Straight vertical and horizontal hairlines are the ordinary kind. A crack running diagonally out of a window or door corner, or stepping down through the mortar joints of the block, is the pattern that says something under the house has moved. Worth knowing before anybody patches over it.
Then sound. Knock on the wall with a knuckle, working outward from the damage. Solid stucco answers back like a rock. Where it goes hollow and drummy, the stucco has let go of whatever is behind it — the coat beneath it, the lath, or the block. That is delamination, and it is the one item on this list that looks perfectly fine from the driveway. The stucco is still there. It is just not attached any more.
Last, stains and bulges. Rust bleeding out of a lintel or a corner bead. A soft spot that gives a little under thumb pressure. A wall that reads out of plane when you sight along it from the corner. Those mean water has been working in there for a while.
Tell us what you found when you call. It changes what we bring.
What we actually do to a failed section
We sound the wall out past the visible damage and take off everything that reads hollow. A patch bonded to loose stucco has a countdown on it, so the repair area usually ends up bigger than the crack looked.
Then we deal with whatever let the water in, because the crack is the symptom and not the cause. Behind it there is generally a reason — a joint that got caulked instead of repaired, a flashing detail at a roofline, a corner bead that rusted and swelled, a sprinkler head that has been hitting the same three feet of wall every morning for six years. Close the wall without fixing that and you have paid us to hide it.
Then we rebuild in coats and let each one take the time it needs. Stucco is a layered system and it wants to be repaired as one. Rushing that is the most common reason a repair cracks again around its own edges inside a year.
The texture gets matched against your wall while it is still wet, on a test area, before we commit to it on the repair.
Why you can see the last guy's patch
Three reasons, and only one of them is about color.
The first is texture. Knockdown, lace, sand, dash — each one is a particular sand size worked a particular way, and texture is what decides how light lands on the wall. Get the grit or the trowel pass wrong and the patch shows up in low afternoon sun even when the color is dead on.
The second is timing. Stucco is one color wet, another color dry, and different again once it has been painted. A patch judged wet on a cloudy morning can read as a bright square by the end of the week.
The third is what never got done. Material spread over a wall that is still wet behind it, or over rusting metal that was painted rather than cut back, pushes itself off again — and the second failure is bigger than the first, because it takes the new work with it.
Where a repair stops being worth it
We would rather do the smaller job, and most of the time the smaller job is the right one. The line is not really about how bad any single spot looks.
It is repair territory when the trouble is contained: one elevation, one or two areas — around a window, at a roofline transition, down a corner — and the rest of the wall sounds solid when you go over it.
It is re-stucco territory when it is everywhere: cracking across three or four elevations, hollow areas that keep growing as we sound them, lath rusted through rather than spotted, or a finish patched so many times it has become a map of the repairs before ours.
In between those, we give you both numbers and say plainly what each one buys. A wall that will need us again in two years is not a saving.
The wall is the only honest sample
Stucco gets judged by eye from twenty feet away, so we would rather show you than describe it. Every photograph in our gallery is a wall this crew worked on, shot before and after, with the town named on the card. Where a job's town was never written down the card says Brevard County, because guessing at one would be worse than admitting we do not know.
Get a range before anyone comes out
Take a few pictures on your phone — the damage up close, then a few steps back so the amount of wall involved is visible, then the whole side of the house. Put them through the form on this site and the AI reads them and gives you a rough range in about a minute.
Treat that as a starting point for a budget, not as a quote. Tony still drives out, walks the house with you, sounds the wall himself and writes the real number. That visit costs nothing and there is nothing to sign at the end of it.
Stucco repair questions
- The same crack keeps coming back after it is patched. Why?
- Because the patch was the whole repair. A crack that reopens in the same line is usually sitting over something that is still moving or still getting wet — a joint the wall needs and does not have, a detail above it letting water in, or a section that had already lost its bond before anyone filled it. Filling it again gets you the same result on the same schedule. The fix is to open it up far enough to find out which of those it is.
- Nothing is cracked, but one area sounds hollow. Is that urgent?
- It is the thing worth getting looked at soonest, even though it is the thing that looks best. Hollow means the stucco has separated from what is behind it and water is already moving in that gap. Nothing shows on the outside until enough of it lets go at once, and by then the repair covers a much bigger area than it would have.
- Can stucco be repaired during the rainy season?
- Yes, and most of the year here is some version of that. Stucco needs to stay damp while it cures, so heat and dry wind are harder on a fresh repair than humidity is. What actually stops us is rain landing on work that has not set, so we schedule around the afternoon storms and we will tell you honestly if a stretch of weather is going to move your dates.
- Does the old paint have to come off to fix the wall?
- Not off the whole house. It comes off the repair area, because new material has to bond to stucco rather than to a paint film, and it gets cut back far enough that the edge is on sound wall. Everything outside that stays as it is. Plan on repainting at least the elevation we worked on, though — a repair can match the wall exactly and still hold its sheen differently until paint evens it out.
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What Brevard homeowners say
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Not sure what you’re looking at?
Send a photo or have Tony come take a look. The estimate is free and there’s no pressure.