Traditional Stucco Queens
Traditional stucco in Queens, also called hard coat stucco. A full three coat system weighs around ten pounds a square foot, and on a wood framed Queens house that is a load worth checking before anyone mixes anything.
Traditional stucco in Queens, also called hard coat stucco. A full three coat system weighs around ten pounds a square foot, and on a wood framed Queens house that is a load worth checking before anyone mixes anything.
Most of Queens is wood framed, and that changes what a three coat system asks of the building. On solid masonry the weight of the stucco is irrelevant, because the wall already carries many times more. On a framed house you are adding roughly ten pounds per square foot to an elevation that was not necessarily designed with it in mind.
The second difference is movement. Timber expands and contracts with humidity through the year and a cement wall does not. As a traditional stucco contractor in Queens we set control joints into the layout before starting, because the joints are what decide whether a wall cracks in a straight line where you put it or in a random one where you did not.
Four things that a solid masonry wall would never make you think about.
That is what a full three coat build weighs. Across a large Queens elevation it adds up to a real load, and on an older frame house we would rather establish that the framing carries it than find out afterwards.
A rigid cement wall on a moving timber frame will crack somewhere. Joints decide where. They get laid out as part of the design rather than added when the first crack appears.
A Queens gable is a large uninterrupted area high up, meeting the roof line on two angles. Water runs along those junctions rather than across them, and that detail fails long before the field of the wall does.
A chimney rising through a framed Queens house moves independently of the wall around it. Running stucco straight across that line without allowing for it puts a crack there within a season or two.
Before any material is ordered we divide the Queens elevation into panels and mark where the joints will run. Panel areas are limited by specification, so this is arithmetic before it is judgment.
At changes of plane, at floor lines, above and below openings, and where a framed wall meets masonry. Those are the places a Queens wall would crack anyway. A joint there is a crack you chose.
Only once the layout is set does anything go on the frame wall. Joint accessories are fixed as part of the first coat rather than cut in afterwards, because retrofitting a joint into a finished Queens wall does not work.
Nearly everything written about three coat stucco assumes a masonry building. Weight does not matter, movement is minimal, and the wall behind it is doing the structural work. A Queens house is none of those things. It is timber, it moves through the year, and the wall you are coating is holding the roof up. The system still works, and it works well, but the questions that decide whether it lasts are different ones. Anybody quoting a frame house the same way they would quote a walk-up has not asked them.
Frame construction runs right across the borough, from Ozone Park and Woodhaven through Maspeth and Middle Village out to Bayside and Whitestone.
See stucco contractor Queens for our other stucco work in the borough, or traditional stucco NYC for how the three coat system is built up.
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Around ten pounds per square foot for a full build at roughly seven eighths of an inch. On masonry that is irrelevant. On a wood framed Queens house it is a load the structure has to carry, and on an older property it is worth confirming rather than assuming.
Most can, and most Queens houses already do. What we look at is the age of the framing, whether there has been water damage in the wall, and whether anything structural has been altered. Where there is doubt, that gets resolved before the job rather than during it.
On a frame wall, yes. Cement is rigid and timber moves seasonally, so the wall will crack somewhere. Control joints decide where that happens and keep it in a straight designed line rather than a random one across the field of the wall.
Carefully at the two sloping junctions, which is where gables fail. The field of a Queens gable is straightforward because there are usually no openings in it. Water running along the roof line rather than off it is the problem, so the flashing and the termination at those angles do most of the work.
At a joint, always. A masonry chimney and a timber frame move independently, so running a continuous coat across that line guarantees a crack there. The junction gets a designed break with a sealant detail rather than being coated straight through.
