Stucco repair costs in San Francisco

Walk the Sunset and you're walking through a stucco neighborhood. San Francisco Planning says most building there happened between 1925 and 1950. The standard house was a stucco-clad single-family home on a 25-foot lot, with the garage at street level and the living space above. Mediterranean, Spanish, Tudor, French and Storybook fronts all wore stucco, often thickly textured.

Those walls are now roughly 75 to 100 years old, and they live in fog. NASA describes summer marine-layer fog as routine in San Francisco, as sea breezes cross cold upwelled ocean water and push inland. That's a lot of damp air against old plaster. Look for stains under windowsills and soft or crumbling spots near the garage door, where water can sit behind the wall.

That thick texture is what a patch has to match. A smooth patch on a rough front shows from across the street.

On permits, the Department of Building Inspection lets in-kind siding repair and minor dry rot repair go through over-the-counter review. Changing the finish on a wall you can see from the street is different. That needs drawn plans, so decide early whether you're repairing your stucco or replacing it with something else.