Churches
Steeples and bell towers, parapets at the roof line, and long sanctuary walls with almost nothing breaking them up. Usually on a building that has been patched before, and always on a calendar that belongs to the congregation, not to us.
Commercial stucco, EIFS and plaster.
Facade repair and new application on churches, storefronts, restaurants, offices and multifamily buildings — almost always on a building that nobody moves out of. Twenty‑five years in the trade, on every stucco system, and a scope written so the people who have to approve it can read it.
Commercial work
The buildings we get called to.
Commercial calls usually come from one of three people: a property manager with an elevation that has started to stain, a general contractor pricing the stucco and EIFS package on a job, or a church committee that has been putting a repair off for a couple of years. The building is different every time. The reason the wall failed usually is not.
Retail and storefront
Sign bands, cornices, column wraps and the parapet that carries the name. Very often EIFS above the storefront line, and very often failing where a sign or a light fixture penetrates it.
Restaurants
Heat, grease and exhaust penetrations at the back of the building, a patio and an entrance at the front, and a dining room that cannot shut for two weeks. The sequence matters more here than anywhere else.
Offices
Whole elevations, entrances and canopies. On an office building, how we reach the wall usually decides the schedule more than how much wall there is — parking, setbacks and lift access get worked out before a number goes on paper.
Multifamily and HOA
Apartment blocks, condominiums and association‑managed property, where the same detail has failed on twenty units at once. We scope it building by building and elevation by elevation, so a board can see exactly what it is approving.
Churches
Church buildings, and the committee that has to choose.
A church repair is rarely decided by one person. It is decided by five or ten people who do not do this for a living, who have collected two or three bids, and who are trying to compare them honestly and then explain the number to everybody else. We write our scope for that reader.
What the work involves on a church
Church buildings put stucco in the hardest places it can go. A steeple or bell tower is tall, narrow and exposed on four sides, so it takes the weather first and it is the hardest thing on the property to get to safely. Parapets and copings at the roof line are the most common place water starts, because they get wet from the top as well as the face, and a coping joint that has opened up will feed water down inside a wall for years before anything shows on the outside.
And a sanctuary wall is usually one long, uninterrupted elevation with very little breaking it up — no windows, no offsets, nothing to hide behind. That is exactly the kind of wall where a patch that is slightly off in texture or slightly off in color is visible from the parking lot. On a church, matching is not a detail. It is most of the job.
Working around the calendar
A church is not an empty building. There are services, a weekday preschool or a school, choir practice, and funerals and weddings that were booked a long time ago. Scaffold across a door on a Wednesday afternoon is an inconvenience. The same scaffold on a Sunday morning is a problem. We ask for the calendar the church actually keeps before we price the work, and we sequence the elevations around it — not the other way round.
We have worked on a church in Harvey, Louisiana.
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Bids that can be laid side by side
Two contractors can quote the same wall and mean completely different things by it. Our scope names which elevations, how much of each, measured, and what is being done to them — so if one bid is lower, the committee can see what is not in it.
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A straight answer on whether it can wait
Committees ask us this constantly. Sometimes a wall genuinely has another season or two in it and the honest answer is to watch it. Sometimes water is already in the sheathing and waiting is the expensive choice. We will tell you which one you have.
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Something you can take back to the congregation
Photographs of what is behind the wall once it is opened, and a plain description of what we found. Whoever has to stand up and explain the number should have something to explain it with.
Retail and storefront
Work on a building that has to keep selling.
Strip retail and standalone stores around here are very often EIFS above the storefront line — the sign band, the cornice, the parapet that carries the name. It went up fast, it is light, and it is usually the first thing on the building to fail, generally where sign anchors, conduit and light fixtures pass through it. Cement patching will not hold on that; EIFS has to be repaired as the system it is, or it fails again in the same place. More on EIFS repair.
Color is the other half of retail work. One tenant bay repaired on its own reads as a repair from the parking lot unless the finish and the color carry across the whole elevation. We match texture and color on the wall rather than off a chart, and where a coating has faded unevenly across a run of bays, recoating the full elevation is often the only way to make the repair disappear.
We have worked on a jewelry store in Huntsville, Alabama.
On a trading building
The store sets the terms
Deliveries, parking spaces, the customer door, the hours the sign has to be lit, and whichever bay cannot have a lift parked in front of it this week. None of that is our decision to make. Tell us what the constraints are and they go into the sequence, priced in, rather than turning up as a problem in week two.
Occupied buildings
What it actually means to work on a building nobody moves out of.
Most commercial stucco work happens with people inside. That is a planning problem more than a plastering problem, and it is worth settling before anybody puts up a ladder.
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Staging and access
How we reach the wall sets most of the schedule. Ladders, rolling scaffold, tube scaffold and a lift each need different ground under them and different room around them, and on a tight site a lift usually has to come and go rather than sit for a fortnight. That gets worked out on the walk‑through, not on the first morning.
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Doors people actually use
Entrances, fire exits, loading doors and accessible routes stay usable. Where scaffold has to cross a door, it gets a protected walkway under it rather than a sign sending people around the building.
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Dust, debris and what comes down
Cutting out failed stucco makes dust and it makes debris. Openings, vents and fresh‑air intakes near the work get covered, the ground below gets protected, and material comes down in a controlled way instead of off the edge of the scaffold. Vehicles, glass and planting get covered before the work starts, not after somebody complains.
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Nothing gets left open overnight
A wall that has been opened cannot sit open. Work is sequenced so whatever gets opened in a day is closed or covered the same day, and coatings go on inside the temperature and moisture window they will actually cure in — which in this climate rules out more afternoons than people expect.
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Evenings and weekends where a business cannot close
Some elevations cannot be worked on while the building is trading — a dining room, a main entrance, a classroom in session. Tell us which parts of the building are like that and the schedule gets built around it, including working outside trading hours where that is the only way the work gets done.
Scope of work
What we can put in writing.
A commercial scope is a document other people have to read — a manager, a board, an owner who is never on site, a general contractor levelling three bids. Ours covers five things.
Condition assessment of the elevation
We go over the building elevation by elevation and record what is actually there: crack type and where it runs, hollow or delaminated areas found by sounding the wall, staining and efflorescence, failed sealant joints, the state of the parapet and coping, and where water is most likely getting in. It comes back to you with photographs.
Defined repair extents
Not “repair stucco.” Which elevation, which area of it, measured, and marked up on a photograph or an elevation drawing — so there is no argument three weeks later about what was and was not included.
Materials and system
What the wall is now, what is going back on it, and in what build‑up — water‑resistive barrier, lath and coats for traditional work, or matched system components where an EIFS wall is being repaired. Written down, so what turns up on site is what was priced.
Sequence
The order the work happens in, and what has to be true before each stage starts: access in place, a weather window, the building’s own calendar. This is the part of a scope that tells a manager what their building looks like in week three.
How change conditions get handled
Nobody knows what is behind a wall until it is open. Rotted sheathing, rusted lath, a flashing that was never installed — those are found, not predicted. The scope says what happens when we find one: we stop, photograph it, and price the change before we carry on, rather than carrying on and telling you afterwards.
Documentation. Tell us what documentation your project requires and we will tell you what we can provide.
Where we travel
Based in Huntsville. We mobilize for the bigger commercial work.
Day‑to‑day residential work stays close to Huntsville — that is the honest answer, and it is how the driving works. For larger commercial work — a church, a full elevation, a multi‑building property — we mobilize across Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana. We have worked in south Louisiana before.
Send us the elevation.
Drawings, photographs of the wall, or the scope you are bidding — whatever you already have. We will tell you what we are looking at and what it would take to put it right.