Stucco repair costs in Santa Rosa

In unincorporated Sonoma County, a building inspector won't look at two of your three stucco coats. New stucco goes on in layers: scratch, brown and finish, three of them over metal or wire lath. Permit Sonoma points out that the California Building Code doesn't list scratch and brown coat inspections as required. Under its written policy, inspectors don't do them unless the stucco is designed to resist lateral forces. The finish coat can be checked at final inspection.

Santa Rosa has put up a lot of new walls since 2017. On October 8 that year, the Tubbs Fire reached the city limits in a little over three hours. It destroyed 3,098 buildings in the city, including 2,668 single-family homes, about 5 percent of the housing stock, a case study by the International City/County Management Association reports. Most of the roughly 3,000 homes lost were in planned developments, so many owners were building a house for the first time.

Whoever inspects your job, the coats that do most of the work disappear under the next one. If you're hiring a re-stucco, ask the crew to photograph the paper, the lath and each coat before the next one covers it. Keep those pictures with your permit.