Stucco repair costs in Spokane

On November 19, 1996, Spokane iced over. Several hours of freezing rain left up to an inch of ice on trees, roads, buildings and cars, the National Weather Service's Spokane office recalls. Many structures collapsed or were badly damaged. More than 100,000 homes and businesses lost power, some for up to two weeks, and the office calls it one of the most severe ice storms on record. When ice like that coats a wall and then melts, the water finds every open crack at once.

Spokane's houses are old for a Western city. More than a quarter of the homes in the city were built before 1940, Census estimates show, and half were built in 1961 or earlier.

Browne's Addition shows what that age means for stucco. The district's design standards, adopted in 2019, call half-timbered walls assemblies of wood boards set into stucco that may require frequent maintenance. They ask owners to keep the stucco's historic texture and color. For cracks, they say to repair and paint rather than add a new skim layer of plaster or mortar. And one apartment building there lost its contributing status after stucco went on over its original brick and its windows were replaced.