Stucco repair costs in Akron

Akron grew up on rubber, and some of its stucco came with the factory jobs. Goodyear Heights was laid out in 1912 and 1913 by Warren Manning, who also designed the grounds at Stan Hywet, to house workers from Goodyear's East Akron plants. The neighborhood is cited as an example of the Garden City movement, which paired good architecture with original street layouts and parks. Its second phase, written up in The Architectural Forum in 1918, added free-standing single-family homes in brick or stucco, with five or six rooms each.

Those houses are past their hundredth birthdays now. Houses from the 1910s sit right at a turning point in how stucco was hung. The National Park Service notes that expanded metal lath gradually replaced wood lath in the late 1800s and early 1900s. So behind a Goodyear Heights wall you might find either one, and water attacks them differently: wood lath rots, metal lath rusts.

The Park Service lists pebble-dash, roughcast and the so-called English cottage finish among the textured surfaces popular on revival-style houses of the early 1900s. Knowing which one your wall wears, and what kind of lath sits behind it, helps a crew plan the repair before anyone starts chipping.