Selected work, 2024 — 2026
The walls come before the words
Six walls from the Bluffs and the valley behind them, photographed the week the scaffold came down — nothing staged, nothing filtered.
Services & rates
The finish menu
From last season on the coast. The $310 survey comes off the job when we do the work, and every line includes scaffold to three storeys, the sample panel and the final wash-down.
New three-coat stucco$15.20 / sq ft
Scratch, brown and color over paper-backed lath
EIFS restoration$44 / sq ft
Moisture-mapped; foam, mesh and base coat renewed where the readings say
Mineral re-color$4.10 / sq ft
Silicate tint that bonds into the wall, not onto it
Lime match & consolidation$12.80 / sq ft
Old walls stabilized and re-toned in lime
Trim, bands & quoins$26 / lin ft
Coated EPS profiles struck level, meshed in
Probe & color survey$310 flat
Readings at trim, corners and grade; panel left with you
What we do
Three crafts, plainly told
Three-coat, the honest way
Scratch for grip, brown for plane, color for face — each cured on its own clock, the brown rodded to a string until the wall is true. EIFS is faster and we install it well, but it is a different animal: foam and mesh and coatings over a barrier, excellent when detailed right and unforgiving when water gets behind it. We lay both and we tell you which your house is asking for.
EIFS repaired by the map, not the rumor
The rumor is that wet EIFS means tearing off the elevation. The map usually says otherwise: scan first, probe where it matters, open exactly what the readings condemn — often a flat sill or a missing kick-out feeding water into foam. The insulation stays, the opening is matched, and the cause is fixed in the same cut as the damage.
Mineral color, aging on purpose
A filmed coating sits on the wall like tape and eventually peels in sheets; a silicate color bonds chemically into the plaster and matte-downs with age instead of failing. Fifteen years on, the mineral wall shows weather while the filmed wall shows its age. Recoating the first is a wash and a roll — and we keep a sample of each in the van.
How it goes
A wall, from reading to cure
The same sequence on every job — the only variable is your project.
Day 0
The reading
Probe readings at the trim, corners and grade line; a sample panel mixed from pigment and left on the wall to live in your light. The quote is written against what the wall says, not what the brochure shows.
Days 1–2
Water first
Flashings, kick-outs and sill details checked and corrected before any plaster is mixed — most exterior failure is water from above, and coating over a leak is a scheduled disappointment.
Day 3
Scratch
Paper-backed lath furred and lapped, the scratch coat thrown stiff and scored horizontal. Then it rests two full days, whatever the calendar wants.
Days 5–9
Brown
Rodded plumb, floated to tooth, corners struck straight. This coat is the wall itself; the color is only its face, and it cures a week minimum.
Day 10+
Color & cure
One continuous wet edge per elevation in the mineral tint the panel chose, fog-cured against the coast wind. The wash-down a week later, then the twelve-year warranty begins.
The other bid tore off the whole south elevation of EIFS. Casa Vela scanned it, cut out what the map actually condemned — a forty-square-foot problem, not four hundred — and fixed the sill that had been feeding it. The texture match has since fooled two painters and one very thorough insurance adjuster.
The studio, in figures
Fair questions
Traditional three-coat or EIFS — which do I have?
Tap and look: three-coat is dense and mineral all the way through, EIFS sounds hollow and gives slightly at the foam. Pre-1970 coastal houses are almost always the former, the eighties and nineties the latter. The survey settles it in an hour either way.
Can you match a 1932 color?
That is most of the lime work we do. Pigment is matched dry, troweled onto a panel, and the panel lives on your wall through weather — wet plaster lies about its color and we do not guess from a fan deck. Twenty-eight days is the honest match.
Is EIFS a bad system?
No — it is an unforgiving one. As insulation-plus-finish it outperforms on energy; as a moisture path it fails hard at bad details. It suits plenty of walls here. What it does not suit is an installer who will not fix the sill before coating the wall.
What does the coast do to a wall?
Wind-driven salt and fog, mostly — which is why we push mineral color and lime on the Bluffs. They take the weather and wear matte instead of delaminating; a filmed coating on an ocean block is a ten-year countdown.
How far out is the season?
Five to seven weeks for lays in high season, sooner for repair and re-color. The survey happens within the week, and the panel starts curing on your wall the day of it — the clock that matters starts there.
The laying season on the coast books out by May · (555) 011-3098 · walls@casavela.example
Bring us the wall
Tell us the age of the house, what the wall has been doing and the light it lives in. The $310 survey with readings and a curing sample panel comes off any work that follows. walls@casavela.example