Stucco and plaster questions.

Because it is cement, and cement shrinks a little as it cures. That is where the fine cracking on a newer wall comes from, and on its own it is normal.

After that, the wall moves. It expands in the heat and contracts in the cold. The framing behind it settles and dries out over the first few years. Doors and windows put stress into the corners of their openings every time the house moves at all. Control joints — the deliberate straight grooves you see running through a stucco wall — exist to tell the wall where to crack so it does not choose for itself. When there are not enough of them, or the lath behind the wall was not lapped and fastened properly, the wall makes its own decisions.

So a crack by itself is not a verdict. Where it is, what shape it is, and whether it keeps coming back is what tells you what it means.

Some are. Most are not. The difference is readable off the wall if you know what you are looking at.

• Fine cracking spread across a field (hairline or map cracking, roughly a sixteenth of an inch or less) is usually cosmetic — curing and thermal movement.
• A diagonal crack running off the corner of a window or a door is movement, not cosmetics. Something is loading the wall at that opening. That one is worth looking at.
• Cracking in a regular grid or pattern is following the lath or the framing behind the wall, which points at how it was built rather than how it has aged.
• Any crack that darkens or stains after rain, or that has white chalky residue around it, is passing water. That is the one that stops being cosmetic.

The rough rule: if it is wet, if it is open wider at one end than the other, or if it has come back after being filled, have somebody look at it. Otherwise it can usually wait for a sensible time of year.

Because the crack is a symptom, not the problem. Cracks that come back are usually being driven by movement or by water getting in behind the wall. Fill it without dealing with the cause and it will open again, generally within a year and in exactly the same line.

Movement means something is still flexing — a missing control joint, framing that moves seasonally, a header or a lintel carrying more than it should. It puts the same stress through the same line every year, and filler does not stop a wall from moving.

Water is the other driver. It gets in at an edge, soaks what is behind the stucco, and that substrate swells and shrinks with the weather. Either way, the filled line is now the weakest path through that wall, so that is where it breaks next time.

This is generally how people end up calling us the second time. Fixing it properly means finding what feeds it before touching the crack itself, which is why the first thing we ask is whether it shows up after rain.

The wall usually tells you well before it fails. What to look for:

• A stain that spreads after rain and takes days to fade — especially under a window, or where a roof line dies into a wall.
• White chalky residue on the surface (efflorescence). Those are salts left behind as water travels through the wall and evaporates. It is proof water is in there.
• A hollow sound when you knock, or a soft area with a little give (delamination) — the stucco has separated from what is behind it.
• Flaking, chipping or shedding at the bottom of a wall (spalling), where water collects.
• A bubbled or swollen patch, which usually means the sheathing behind it has gotten wet and is failing.
• Inside the house: a musty smell in one room, a baseboard that has gone soft, or paint lifting on the inside face of an exterior wall.

Look at the bottom of the wall too. The weep screed — the metal strip with slots along the base — is the drainage exit. If a flower bed, mulch or a newer patio has buried it, then water that does get in has nowhere to leave from.

If any of that sounds like your wall, send us a photo before it gets bigger. Water behind stucco does not dry out on its own in this climate.

Yes. That is EIFS — an Exterior Insulation and Finish System, sold under names like Dryvit, and known to most people as synthetic stucco or the styrofoam kind. It is foam board with a thin reinforced base coat and an acrylic finish over the top. Traditional stucco is cement, sand and lime built up over lath. From the street they look alike. They fail differently, so they are repaired differently.

The common mistake is patching EIFS with cement stucco. Cement is heavy, rigid and closed to vapor, and it is being stuck onto a system that is light, flexible and depends on moisture being able to get back out. The patch traps water at its edges and fails again, usually bigger than it was.

If you are not sure which one you have, there is a simple way to tell, and here is how EIFS repair actually works.

Same trade, different side of the wall, different mix.

Stucco is the exterior finish: Portland cement, sand and lime, applied over lath and a water‑resistive barrier. Its job is to take weather — shed rain, handle sun and temperature swings, and let the wall behind it dry.

Plaster is the interior finish: traditionally lime or gypsum over wood or metal lath, and in newer houses a gypsum‑based skim over board. Its job is to be flat, hard and clean under paint.

The trowels are the same and the hand is the same, which is why one man usually does both. The materials, the sequence and the cure are not, which is why you should not let somebody use one where the other belongs.

Start with a photo. Text it or email it — you do not need to know what is wrong or what it is called.

Stand back far enough to get the whole wall in one shot, then take a second one up close on the problem. If it only shows up after rain, say so. That one detail changes what we are looking for.

We will tell you what we are looking at: what system is on your house, what is likely causing it, and whether it is something that needs doing now or can wait for better weather.

Then we come and look at it properly. Photos get you a straight answer, not a price — nothing goes on paper until somebody has stood in front of the wall and put a hand on it. What you get after that is a written scope: what we are doing, in what order, and what it costs, so you can compare it honestly against anyone else’s.

Send us a photo, or call (256) 293-0418.

There is no number we can put on this page that would be worth anything to you. Two walls with the same crack in them can be two very different jobs. What we can do is tell you honestly what moves the price, so you can size it up yourself and so you know what to ask anybody else who quotes it.

• How much wall is affected. A crack is one thing. An elevation is another. The line between them is often not visible until an edge is opened.
• Height and access. Work you can reach off a ladder, work that needs scaffold, and work that needs a lift are three different jobs at the same square footage. Access is frequently the biggest single item on a small repair.
• What is behind it. If the sheathing is dry and sound, it is a stucco job. If water has been in there, there is carpentry and lath to do before any stucco goes on, and nobody can price that from the driveway.
• Whether the finish has to be matched across a large uninterrupted elevation. Matching a texture into a big wall with no natural break to work out to is the most skilled part of this trade, and sometimes the honest answer is to finish the whole face instead.

That is why we look before we quote, and why a photo gets you a diagnosis rather than a figure.

Yes, for the bigger jobs.

Everyday residential work stays around Huntsville and North Alabama. That is what makes sense for a house call — a crack repair does not pay for a day on the road, and pretending otherwise would not serve you either.

For larger commercial work — churches, storefronts, whole elevations, buildings with a real scope of work attached — we mobilize across Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana. We have done church work down in south Louisiana, so the distance is not theoretical.

If you are outside North Alabama, tell us what the building is and how big the job is, and we will tell you straight whether it is one we should be driving to. More on how far we travel.

Yes. Past work includes a church in Harvey, Louisiana and a jewelry store in Huntsville, Alabama.

Commercial is a different job from a house even when the wall is identical. You are working an elevation rather than a patch. The building is still being used while you are on it — a store that opens in the morning, a congregation that meets on Sunday — so the sequence has to be planned around that instead of the other way round. And the person you are answering to is usually a property manager or a building committee rather than one homeowner, which means the scope has to be written down clearly enough that several people who have never bought facade work can read it and agree.

Churches in particular tend to run on committees and multiple bids, and that is fine by us — a scope that is written plainly holds up to being read by eight people. More on commercial and church work.