Synthetic Stucco in Kansas City
Drive through Brookside or Hyde Park and the stucco on those older homes is traditional three-coat cementitious stucco, the same system that went on when those houses were built in the 1920s and 1930s. Drive through newer construction in Lee's Summit, Liberty, or the developments that went up throughout Johnson County in the 1990s and 2000s, and a significant portion of what looks like stucco is EIFS, a fundamentally different system that requires a fundamentally different approach to repair.
EIFS stands for Exterior Insulation and Finish System. It starts with rigid foam insulation board adhered directly to the substrate, followed by a base coat embedded with fiberglass reinforcing mesh, and finished with a thin acrylic finish coat that carries the color and texture. The result looks like smooth stucco from the street and has better insulating properties than traditional stucco, which made it popular with builders throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. What it doesn't do is behave like traditional stucco when it's damaged or when water finds a way in.
Early EIFS installations in Kansas City were barrier systems, meaning the system was designed to keep all water out through the exterior surface rather than manage any moisture that got through. That approach worked as long as the system stayed intact at every joint, penetration, and termination point. When it failed, and Kansas City's hail exposure, freeze-thaw cycling, and wind-driven rain gave it plenty of opportunities to fail, water that got behind the foam board had no drainage path and no way to dry. The concealed moisture damage to sheathing and framing that resulted was often significant by the time homeowners discovered it. Drain-screen EIFS systems developed later incorporated a drainage plane that addressed this, but the earlier systems are still on a lot of Kansas City homes.
EIFS repair requires identifying what system is present and what the damage has done to the full assembly. A crack in an EIFS finish coat may indicate base coat damage or substrate deterioration below. Impact damage from hail, which Kansas City gets regularly, can breach the finish coat and base coat and expose the foam insulation below to moisture. The repair has to restore the full system integrity rather than just closing the visible damage on the surface.
If you're not certain whether your Kansas City home has traditional stucco or EIFS, we can identify the system during an inspection and explain what that means for any repair or maintenance work ahead.
Call us for EIFS repair or synthetic stucco repair in Kansas City.
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