Stucco patching job
This first stucco patching job that I’m going to show you is regarding a new window installation that was improperly flashed by the installer, which wasn’t me, by the way. This first picture of the stucco patching job is when I was cutting away and removing the stucco from around the top of the window. You will notice in this picture that the original cut line was only 1 ½”. This is the amount of stucco that was removed and subsequently replaced by the window installer.

In the next picture of the stucco patching job, you will see the proper amount of stucco that needs to be removed in order to flash a window properly.

After I removed the 7” of stucco for the stucco patching job, I pulled back the original wire mesh, cut off all but about 2” of it and then left about 4” of the original tar paper to overlap the new flashing that I installed.

In this next picture of the stucco patching job I used a product called Fortiflash, which is a special type of window flashing that has a self adhesive backing that bonds to the window header. I purposely brought this down and lipped it onto the top of the window frame for watershed purposes and water tight integrity.

The next step of the stucco patching job is to make sure that the new flashing goes underneath the original flashing or tar paper and then to fold it over and onto the new flashing in proper sequence. In these next two pictures of the stucco patching job, you notice that the first one shows the flaps of the old flashing and then how it looks after they have been folded over and onto the new flashing. I used clear silicone to adhere the old to the new.


The next part of the stucco patching job is to install the wire lathe. I prefer to use the fine mesh stucco lathe, as it has more contact surface for the stucco to adhere to. You may or may not be able to see in this picture of the stucco patching job that I not only used screws to secure the mesh, as apposed to nails, but that I also used zip ties to unify the old mesh to the new mesh. The zip ties that I used are blue in color.

In this next picture of the stucco patching job, you will see the final appearance of how the stucco looks. It’s next to impossible to get the stucco patch to match the existing stucco for several reasons, which I won’t go into detail about here.

In this last picture of the stucco patching job, I have a close up picture showing how I ran a bead of white caulk along the top of the window to help watershed. I also did this along the sides and bottom of the window. This is very important with stucco patching because stucco is concrete based and will crack from earthquake vibrations and such.
