Hi. My Cape style house has a stucco finish applied to three sides (rear and sides) of the house. My question is, how do I deal with stucco if I want to say put a new window thru it? Like how do you cut thru it and ensure that you seal it back up (water proof) when the window is installed? Are there any good books that describe how to work with a stucco covered wall. Also, is it difficult to remove all of the stucco from the walls if I want to replace it with a different type of exterior material? I can’t see leaving it on and just covering it up. It seems cleaner to me to just remove it and put on siding if I wanted to (yes, more time consuming and expensive but in the long run probably a better). Thanks.
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You can make fairly neat cuts in stucco with a diamond blade in a circular saw. Use an old beater saw because of the abrasive dust. Avoid running the diamond blade into wood, it burns the blade and ruins it.
Start by cutting thru about 6" smaller in all directions than what you want, and break out the middle. Then you can see the actual thickness and set the blade a tad short of that. Use that depth to cut your final lines, and carefully break out the remaining stucco without damaging the tar paper or whatever moisture barrier is behind it.
Stucco is porous, like a very hard sponge, so getting the flashing on the new window correctly over/under the old moisture barrier is extremely important.
To demo all the stucco, get some day laborers and a dumpster. It's physically hard work, but don't take much smarts. Smash with a sledge to get started, then mostly pry it off the studs. Let its own weight help you take it down. Big wire cutters will also come in handy to cut the chicken wire and get stuff outta your way. Doing it myself, I'd wait til early spring when it won't get rained on, but it's still fairly cool....
-- J.S.
we have a term problem here, If it syntheci (sp) stucco it nothing but foan board with a thin cover. The foam board is porus. If it the concrete orignal stucco, the true stucco, it is not porus but either way, cut a hole, flash window
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