(214) 807-0414Request an assessmentWeep screed
Stucco is not waterproof and was never designed to be. It manages water by letting what gets behind it drain out at the bottom. That exit is a strip of perforated metal at the base of the wall, and a surprising proportion of the stucco problems in this region come down to that strip being buried, blocked, or never installed at all.
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What this covers
It terminates the stucco at the bottom of the wall and gives water that reached the drainage plane behind it a route out and away from the framing. It is the exit of the system. Without a functioning one the wall still collects water and simply has nowhere to put it.
Practice and code call for the screed to sit a specified distance above finished grade, and a smaller distance above paving — commonly cited as a few inches to earth and around half that to a hard surface. Adoption varies by jurisdiction, so the applicable figure belongs to the city that permits the work, but the principle does not vary at all.
With the termination covered by soil, mulch or a new patio, the base of the wall sits against damp ground and moisture climbs. It shows as staining, efflorescence, blistering paint and stucco that has gone soft a foot or two up the wall — usually diagnosed as a stucco defect when it is a grade problem.
What to know
A spray head aimed at the base of a wall soaks the same patch of wall several times a week for years. In this climate that is a larger and far more regular water load on the wall than rainfall is. Turning a head, changing a nozzle or moving a line is among the cheapest exterior repairs available and among the most consistently overlooked.
A raised bed, added soil, a new patio poured to the wall, or a path built up over time. These are made years after construction and they are a common cause of a wall problem that gets blamed on the original stucco. Establishing what changed, and roughly when, is part of the assessment rather than an afterthought.
Regrading, cutting the bed back, or in some cases cutting the stucco back to install a proper termination. The order is not negotiable: a repair carried out while the wall is still being soaked is a repair with a short and predictable life, and doing it in the wrong order is how the same wall gets repaired twice.
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A short, non-diagnostic guide for working out what kind of assessment conversation to prepare for.
Decision support
Four situations, and the sensible next move for each. It does not diagnose a roof, decide insurance coverage, or stand in for somebody looking at the property.
Questions
Most often water moving up from the base rather than in from the face. Check what the bottom edge of the stucco is sitting against, whether the weep screed is visible at all, and where the sprinklers land. Those three observations answer it more often than anything on the wall above does.
There is a published figure in code and in product instructions, and it is adopted locally, so the exact number belongs to the permitting jurisdiction. What can be said generally is that the screed should be visible and clear, and that if you cannot see it the clearance is wrong.
In some cases, by cutting the stucco back at the base and installing a termination — which is real work and involves opening the bottom of the wall. On many properties the cheaper and more effective first move is to lower the grade and redirect the water instead.
Almost always because the source was still running. A repair carried out while the base of the wall is being soaked — by grade, by paving, or by irrigation — has a short and entirely predictable life, and the second failure then looks like poor workmanship when it was a sequencing decision. Ask what changed about the water before the wall was patched. If the answer is nothing, that is the answer.
Assessment request
Short, routing-only questions. Nothing here asks you to diagnose the roof yourself.