Redstart Stucco & Lath · Copper Gulch & the Veragine foothills · Measured since 1998
Flat is a measurement, not a hope.
Every Redstart wall opens with instruments: moisture probes at the trim, corners and grade, strings on every corner, and a rate sheet printed against what the readings say. The brown coat is rodded to the string and cured a week; the colour is batched integral; and the joints land where the structure steps — because a wall that has to be flat should be measured, not believed.
The Redstart method
Why a ledger and not a lookbook
Stucco sells in photographs and fails in measurements, so we lead with the measurements. Every job opens with probes and strings, every quote is written against them, and every wall closes with the same instruments brought back twelve months later. The rate sheets below carry no tiers and no tiers’ worth of fine print — a square foot is a square foot, from the 1904 miner cottages to the new builds up Veragine Road.
The year-later straightedge
Twelve months after every lay we return with the string, the probes and the joint survey. Anything we touched that reads out of true gets made right at our cost — and the visit is on our calendar before the crew leaves your drive, not on yours.
What we do
What the yard lays
Three-coat over lath, rodded true
Scratch for grip, brown for plane, colour for face — over two layers of paper and furred wire lath, with a weep screed at the grade and expansion joints at every structural break. The brown coat is the wall itself, and it cures seven days because the calendar belongs to the coat.
EIFS by the moisture map
Scan first, probe second, open exactly what the readings condemn — usually a flat sill or a missing kick-out feeding water into otherwise sound foam. Adhesive, foam, meshed base coat and finish renewed in place, the insulation stays on the house, and the cause is fixed in the same cut as the damage.
Stitching & patch-match
Cracks V-cut, grouted and meshed until they disappear; patches matched to tone, sand grain and the hairline map of the field around them. On the gulch’s old faces we consolidate in kind with lime instead of replacing — a century of weather is worth keeping, and the probes usually say it is sounder than it looks.
How a Redstart job runs
From reading to the year after
Five eras, the same on a cottage as on the Veragine Road development — the only variable is your wall.
Day 0
The reading
Probes at the trim, corners and grade; strings on the corners; the joint survey drawn. The quote is written against the readings the same day, and the panel is mixed before we leave.
Week 1
The panel
Candidate colour curing on your wall through foothill weather — twenty-eight days, because wet stucco lies about its colour and the batch answers to the cured panel alone.
Week 2
Paper & lath
Water details corrected first, then two layers of paper, furred wire, weep screed at the grade and the joints laid out where the structure steps — drawn, not guessed.
Weeks 3–4
The coats
Scratch rests two days, brown is rodded plumb and rests seven, colour floats in one continuous wet edge per elevation. Every coat on its own clock, logged as it cures.
Month 12
The year after
The strings and the probes come back. The closing sheet is printed beside the opening one — same instruments, same corners, and the fifteen-year clock verified against evidence instead of adjectives.
Copper Gulch & the Veragine foothills
Ledger pages, 2025 — 2026
Six jobs from last season’s book, photographed at the year-after visit with the opening sheet still in the file.
The year-after visit is the part nobody else offers and everybody should. The crew came back with the same string they strung the day the scaffold went up, photographed the wall beside the day-one sheet, and left us a two-page file that sold the house faster than the kitchen did.
Our 1904 render had been condemned by one bid and painted by two owners. Redstart probed it, found the faces sound and the grip gone in three spots, grouted the lifts and stitched the cracks. Two foothill winters later it reads like what it is — a hundred-year wall that was looked after properly for once.
The rate sheet was the whole negotiation — no tiers, no upgrades, no phone calls about surprises. The EIFS scan turned a re-skin quote into a six-foot repair with a corrected sill, and the texture match has fooled the painter we hired the following spring.
Why rod to a string — isn’t that just old-fashioned?
It is old-fashioned the way a level is old-fashioned: it is how the wall gets flat and stays provably flat. The brown coat is rodded plumb between screeds and checked with the string at close, because every defect under the colour coat is a shadow at five in the afternoon forever. Lasers help us set the screeds; the string is still the judge.
What tolerance can I actually expect?
Within two millimetres on the brown coat over a ten-foot run — tight enough that a straightedge held to the finished wall at dusk shows light nowhere. That is what the rodding buys, and it is why our re-colours photograph without retouching: flat walls take colour evenly, wavy walls take it honestly.
Integral colour versus paint — is the difference real?
A measurable one, in years. Integral pigment lives through the finish coat: through-coloured, vapour-open, touched up without a border, recoated in fifteen to twenty by washing and rolling. Paint films, peels at the exposures and takes a strip-and-recoat cycle with it every time. The gulch sun settles that argument on every filmed wall in the county by about year six.
How do you test for moisture behind EIFS?
A capacitance scan reads through the face for saturated foam, then invasive probes confirm at the suspicious readings — because moisture travels behind the mesh, the stain you can see is usually the end of the trail rather than the source. We open what the map condemns and nothing it does not, and the map goes in your file.
What happens at the year-after visit?
The strings, the probes and the joint survey come back. If everything we touched reads true, you get a closing sheet beside the opening one — dated, photographed, ready for any buyer or insurer. If it does not, the re-work is ours, which is exactly why the reading at day zero was so thorough.
The yard line
Readings within the week, panels mixed the same day, and the same crew strings the wall that read it. The $280 reading comes off any job within a year — and a fair share of them end with the verdict: do nothing yet. ledger@redstartstucco.example
Readings within the week · the laying season runs April to October · (555) 031-9902 · ledger@redstartstucco.example
Put the wall on the ledger
Tell us the age of the house, what the wall has been doing and what the foothill weather has done to it. The $280 reading — probes, strings and a panel left curing — comes off any work that follows. ledger@redstartstucco.example