If moisture has been sitting behind the stucco long enough to ruin the sheathing, or to reach the framing, patching the outside will not hold. The wall has to be rebuilt from the sheathing outward.
When a repair becomes a rebuild
A stain that keeps coming back after it has been patched or painted usually means the source was never fixed. Once water has soaked the sheathing, no surface repair will stop it. From the outside, nobody can tell how far the rot extends, so we do not size the job from a description or a photo. We open the wall and look.
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More answers: What Stucco Repair Costs and What Moves the Price · Insurance Claims for Stucco Repair: What to Document
What fails when the sheathing goes
The sheathing is the layer over the wall framing that everything else is fastened to. When water gets behind the stucco and stays there, the sheathing breaks down, and once it gives, the framing behind it is sitting in the same moisture. Our occasional winter freezes make it worse. Water that has worked into a crack or around a flashing edge freezes, expands, and pushes the gap wider, and it repeats that cycle year after year.
How we find the edge of the damage
We inspect the exposed substrate first. That means opening the stucco so we can see the sheathing and framing directly. We cut the damaged sheathing back to sound material at the framing lines, so the new panel lands on solid wood instead of the middle of a rotted section. Then we check the framing. Studs and plates behind failed sheathing are sometimes wet enough to need repair too, and we fix them before anything new goes on.
What the rebuild includes
With the framing repaired, we install replacement sheathing over it. We remove what failed and put in new material. On top of that goes the weather-resistive barrier, then flashing at the openings and wall intersections, so water that does get past the stucco is directed out instead of sitting against the sheathing. The stucco is rebuilt only after those layers are in. Putting new stucco over the same old setup is how the damage comes back.
What a project like this costs
A typical mid-size stucco remediation project runs $45,000 to $72,000 and we are glad to give you that range on the phone. The exact number is confirmed once we have seen the job. It moves with how much sheathing comes out, how much framing needs repair, and whether the lath was damaged along with the sheathing. The size of the wall area, the number of openings, and the number of intersections we have to flash also change the figure. Damage in one area with sound framing lands toward the low end. Rot across several wall sections pushes it up.
What to Expect to Pay
The figures here give you a sense of scale, and you get a written price for your own job before you commit.
$4,500–$13,500
$1,350–$4,950
$2,700–$9,000
Also Available
Talk it through with us at (505) 666-6701, there's no commitment.