Stucco! Stucco! Stucco!
With a nod to Richard Fleischer’s 1970 iconic hit movie, Tora!Tora!Tora!, that won acclaim for its special effects and realistic warlike cinematography, I feel the need to wrap up my tale of stucco with regard to my Hobbit House since I have flip-flopped more than HGTV and the DIY (now Magnolia) Network combined. Given how many homes out here on the chaparral are stucco construction and the number of immigrants who pride themselves in being good stuccoers, I really thought this was going to be the easiest part of this project to outsource. I should know better by now and I should especially understand that the combination of COVID and the booming inflationary economy (Still not sure how that has happened and I consider myself a well-versed student of macroeconomics) has left all supply chains somewhat hincky.
But tomorrow at 7am I will have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to workers scurrying around my back hillside. I expect Ernie (I suspect it is Ernesto in actuality) to come with two non-English-speaking Mexican laborers who he has trained in the basics of stucco. They will haul, mix and trowel on 25 80 pound bags of base coat (a.k.a. scratch coat). That totals to one full ton of stucco plus another 312 pounds of water added to that stucco. I suspect they will actually do half of it tomorrow and hopefully the other half on Sunday (Monday at the worst I imagine). That is pretty much all that they will be doing since I have done all the lathe (I’m sure I will hear from Ernie that I did it wrong or not well enough, but that’s to be expected from a stucco expert speaking about the work of a rank amateur). So, its carrying bags down, using my hose to put 1.5 gallons per bag into a mix and slapping it on the mesh from bottom to top (always start on the bottom left according to You-Tube). Then, when you have finished a side, you take the groove scratcher and cut grooves that are used to hold the next layer of the stuff. You have to clean up as you go since stucco dries fast under normal conditions, but under our current Santa Ana wind conditions, which are particularly dry, it will dry even faster. That’s pretty much it.
Then, the next day the second or brown coat goes on pretty much the same way (not sure if you need to scratch that one too). Then, it gets left for a week to throughly dry out and they come back to put on 8-9 80 pound bags of color or finish coat mixed to a palette to more or less match the house’s color. Then the walls are done. Three layers. Stucco, followed by stucco, followed by colored stucco. Not so complicated, or so I think.
Meanwhile, since I contracted with Angel to initially help me for Thursday/Friday/Saturday and then agreed that I only need him for Saturday (but told him out of guilt that I would pay him double for the day), I have to find things for him to do. This was not an ideal scheduling. I want him to help me put the remaining beams up on the top of the house since they are heavy and sitting right now in the garage. It will be a bit of a pain in the butt to be working around the stucco guys, but the scheduling is their fault, so that will just have to be the way it gets done. I will also use him to carry down the 1×8”x16’ boards that I have to do the roofing. I did my math wrong and only ordered 13 of them. My math tells me that I have 147 inches of beam to cover (that’s the 12’ plus the 3 inches of radial arc), so I need 20 of those boards or 7 more than I have.
In any case, I plan to use Angel tomorrow to put the boards up on the beams and to get the roof more or less nailed down so that I make good use of his time. I think that the stucco kings can work around the beams just fine and I know that neither Handy Brad nor I are inclined to want to either carry down all that lumber and I certainly know that neither he nor I want to climb up on that roof and be screwing 1×8” boards down for the roof on our hands and knees (hoping not to go through the boards as we go). One of my issues has been that I don’t know how to transport 16-foot boards in an easy manner. And then it occurred to me, why can’t I just use twice as many 8-footers, and then it hit me…there is no reason whatsoever. If I were going for perfection, I never would have jig-cut my beams myself. Putting 35% of the roof boards on that have a seam in the middle seems to be inconsequential versus all the other irregularities or uncertainties of this construction.. Every time I get into a debate with someone about this or that detail of this project, I find myself saying, “Hey, it’s only a playhouse for Christ’s sake”. So my comment about spending inordinate time and attention on getting 16-footers is about what you would expect. In fact, tonight I ordered and picked up fourteen 8-footers and a roll of felt-backed tar paper. I am ready to roll… or unroll.
So here is what I hope will happen tomorrow. At 7am, the stucco crew will arrive and I will review where everything is and what I expect and don’t expect in the stuccoing process for this playhouse. There will be some comments about the my wire lathe preparation, but I will not let that slow down the job. They will get down to it and by then, Handy Brad should be arriving with Angel. Handy Brad will be off to his job and I will practice my Spanish on Angel. We will start by carrying the three remaining beams down to the site. Then we will position them and set them into the Simpson metal brackets I’ve installed. This will be a little tricky because the stucco guys will be stuccoing somewhere on the 10×8 foot structure. I figure there should be enough room for the two of us to work around the two of them. We’ll see. Hopefully, we won’t have to do much force fitting with a mini-sledge, but if we do, better now than when the stucco gets set.
Once the beams are up (remembering that we can only put up four of them since the fifth is awaiting the two white cedar tree posts that are en route from the Amish part of Michigan) we will start taking the 1”x8” roof boards down. There will be a little bit of Jenga figuring out where to put the 8-footers versus the 16-footers, but I think we will get it all put together and the roof will go on all but the porch front, where it will be suspended waiting for those cedar posts. So by tomorrow night I might just have a Hobbit House with one layer of stucco and what should look like a roof (albeit incomplete). When Japanese wing commander Mitsuo Fuchida called the ball on the Pearl Harbor attack, saying that they had caught the Americans off-guard, there must have been a moment when he felt a combination of fear and excitement. Well, this may not be quite so dramatic as in 1941, but I am committed to going in for the kill. Stucco!Stucco!Stucco!