Stucco Contractor Yonkers
Stucco and parge work on Yonkers houses and buildings. On a hillside lot the downhill foundation wall is the one that fails first, and how it gets coated matters more than what it gets coated with.
Stucco and parge work on Yonkers houses and buildings. On a hillside lot the downhill foundation wall is the one that fails first, and how it gets coated matters more than what it gets coated with.
Yonkers is built on a slope, and that shows up on the walls. On most hillside lots one side of the house sits into the ground while the other side has eight or ten feet of foundation wall standing in the open. That exposed wall is nearly always parged or stuccoed, and it has soil and groundwater pressing on one side of it while the weather works on the other.
It fails from the back. Moisture moves through the masonry from the soil, reaches the coating, and pushes it off. What you see is the coating blowing away in sheets near the bottom of the wall while everything higher up looks fine. That pattern is the giveaway, and it is why a repair that only addresses the surface comes back.
On a sloped lot, the downhill foundation wall stands well above grade and carries the parge coat. Soil and groundwater on the back of it, weather on the front, and no way for either side to dry quickly.
A wall with moisture behind it has to let vapor out. A sealer stops it going both ways, pressure builds under the coating, and it blows off in sheets. This is the most common mistake we are called in to undo.
Grade level takes splashback, snow piled against it, and soil sitting directly on the coating. The bottom twelve inches of a Yonkers wall does more work than the rest of the elevation put together.
What the wall needs depends on where it sits on the slope and how much moisture is already in it.
Synthetic insulated systems, suited to above-grade walls rather than foundations.
Where the parge has debonded, it comes off back to sound material. Then we work out where the moisture is arriving from, which on a hillside wall is usually the soil rather than the sky.
A saturated masonry wall cannot be coated. Anything applied to it will debond, and quickly. Depending on the wall and the season that is days rather than hours, and we will say so rather than coat over it to finish on schedule.
The finish goes on once the substrate is dry, specified so vapor can still move outward. On a below-grade or at-grade wall that matters more than any other property the material has.
Most of Westchester runs on a county home improvement contractor license. Yonkers does not. The city issues its own, and a contractor holding only the county license cannot pull a permit for work on a one to three family house inside the city. It is worth asking about before you hire anyone, because plenty of contractors working in Yonkers hold the county license and assume it covers them. We hold both and file directly with the city.
The slope runs through the whole city, so hillside walls turn up everywhere from Ludlow and Nodine Hill up through Dunwoodie to Crestwood and Beech Hill.
Yonkers sits in Westchester County. See stucco contractor Westchester for the rest of the county, or masonry services in Yonkers for everything else we do here.
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Because the moisture is coming from the ground rather than from the sky. On a sloped Yonkers lot the exposed foundation wall takes groundwater from the soil behind it, and that moisture pushes the coating off from the back. The pattern tells you the source, which is why sealing the face of it does not hold.
No, and this is the most common mistake we are called in to undo. A sealer stops vapor moving in both directions, so moisture already in the wall has nowhere to go. Pressure builds under the coating and it comes off in sheets. The wall needs a finish that lets it keep drying outward.
A small test opening, usually in the worst area. It matters in Yonkers more than most places because the substrate changes with the address. Brick multi-family in the south of the city, wood frame in the north, and block in a lot of the mid-century stock between them. Each one takes a different repair.
It is normal and it works, provided it is the right material and the wall can dry. Cement parge over sound masonry performs well for decades. What fails is a hard, sealed coating over a wall that is holding water, and that is what most of the failures we see in Yonkers turn out to be.
