Stucco repair costs in Durham

North Carolina's permit law has a carve-out that covers a lot of stucco work. Under state law, a job on a single-family house that comes in under a set cost needs no building permit, unless it involves load-bearing structure, a change to plumbing, heating or wiring, materials the state code doesn't allow, or a few other listed items. The law even names replacing exterior siding as exempt.

Some of Durham's stucco is a century old. The National Register listing for Forest Hills describes Tudor cottages from about 1923 on Carolina Circle with stucco walls, one with stuccoed buttresses at the entry, and a stuccoed Spanish Colonial Revival house on Forestwood Drive with rough-textured walls. Elsewhere in the district, stucco shows up as a detail on houses that are otherwise brick or wood: a stuccoed gable, stuccoed dormers, pebbledash in the gable ends. On a house like that, the stucco is a small part of the wall and easy to overlook until it cracks.

On walls that old, the real permit question is whether the work reaches the structure. If a crew opens up a stucco wall and finds studs that have to be repaired or replaced, that's load-bearing work, and a permit comes back into the picture. Ask your contractor up front who will pull it if that happens, and how long it adds.