Glossary
Read your own bid.
Every term below appears on real bids for this work, ours included. If a contractor cannot explain one of them to you, that is worth knowing before you sign.
30 terms defined
01
Stucco
- Scratch coat
- The first coat of cement plaster, pressed into the lath and then raked with horizontal grooves while it is still soft. The grooves are what the next coat keys into.If the scratch coat is not fully embedded in the lath, nothing above it is holding on properly.
- Brown coat
- The second coat, floated flat and true. It sets the plane of the wall and does most of the work of making a finished elevation look straight.Waves you can see in a finished wall almost always started here, not in the finish coat.
- Finish coat
- The last, thinnest coat. It carries the texture and usually the color, and it is the only layer anyone ever sees.
- Lath
- The metal mesh fastened over the wall that cement plaster grips. Self-furring lath has dimples stamped into it that hold the mesh off the surface so plaster can push through and lock behind it.Lath fastened flat against the wall gives the plaster nothing to key into, which is a failure you cannot see until it cracks.
- Weather-resistive barrier (WRB)
- The layer between the sheathing and the lath that keeps water out of the wall assembly. Cement plaster is not waterproof, so the barrier behind it is what actually protects the framing.Two layers behind stucco is standard practice, not an upgrade.
- Weep screed
- The perforated metal trim at the base of a stucco wall that gives water a way out at the bottom of the assembly.Buried by soil or a later concrete pour, it stops working and traps water in the wall.
- Control joint
- A deliberate break in the plaster that gives the wall a planned place to move, instead of the wall choosing its own place and cracking there.Long uninterrupted elevations without joints are the most common cause of straight-line cracking.
- Kickout flashing
- The small angled piece of flashing where a roofline meets a wall, which throws runoff clear into the gutter instead of behind the finish.This one detail is behind a large share of the moisture damage found in stucco and EIFS walls.
- EIFS
- Exterior insulation and finish system, sometimes called synthetic stucco. Foam insulation board, a polymer base coat with embedded mesh, and an acrylic finish. It looks like stucco and is repaired nothing like it.Knock on the wall. Hardcoat stucco sounds like concrete, EIFS sounds hollow.
- Back-wrapping
- Carrying the mesh and base coat around the exposed edge of an EIFS board so the foam is never left open at a termination.
- Fog coat
- A thin cement-based color wash sprayed over cured stucco to even out color without adding another textured layer.It is often the right answer when a wall's color has drifted but the texture is sound.
- Sand float finish
- A finish worked with a float so the sand in the mix stands slightly proud, giving an even, fine-grained texture.
- Dash finish
- A finish sprayed rather than troweled, leaving a heavier broken texture that hides substrate movement well.
- Raking light
- Light striking a wall at a shallow angle. It exaggerates every ridge and hollow, which is why finishers inspect under it and why a wall beside a big window is judged harder than one in a hallway.
- Elastomeric coating
- A thick, flexible coating that can bridge hairline cracks in masonry and stucco and stretch as the wall moves.It is a genuine repair on the right wall and a trap on the wrong one, because it can also seal moisture inside.
- Substrate
- Whatever is underneath the layer being applied: sheathing, plaster, board, or an old coating.
- Lath and plaster
- The pre-drywall interior wall system: narrow wood strips nailed across the studs with plaster pushed through the gaps to key behind them. Common in Southern Utah's pioneer-era housing stock.Patching it with drywall compound alone usually fails. The repair has to reattach the original plaster to the lath first.
- Expansive soil
- Clay soil that swells when wet and shrinks when dry, moving whatever is built on it. Documented in parts of Washington County.Stair-step cracking that follows the mortar joints is usually the ground talking, not the finish failing.
02
Stone Masonry
- Dry-stack
- Stone set tight with no visible mortar joint. The mortar is there, behind the stone, doing the work out of sight.It is slower to set than a grouted joint because every piece has to fit.
- Setting bed
- The mortar layer over the scratch coat that the stone is pressed into.
- Back-buttering
- Spreading mortar onto the back of each stone as well as the wall, so there is full contact and no hollow spot behind the piece.
- Adhered stone veneer
- Stone bonded to a wall through lath, scratch coat and setting bed, carrying no structural load. Almost all residential stone in Southern Utah is this rather than full-thickness masonry.
03
Drywall
- Drywall finish levels
- A published scale from Level 0 to Level 5 describing how much compound and sanding a wall has had. Level 4 is tape plus two coats, Level 5 adds a skim coat over the whole surface.Level 4 under a gloss paint or a big window will show every joint. That is a specification problem, not a workmanship one.
- Skim coat
- A thin layer of compound over the entire board face, not just the joints, so the paper and the compound reflect light the same way.
- Tape coat
- The first compound pass, which embeds the paper or mesh tape over a joint.
- Knockdown
- Texture sprayed on and then flattened with a blade once it has begun to set, leaving a mottled surface with flat spots.
- Orange peel
- Sprayed texture left as it lands, with a fine stippled surface like the skin of the fruit.
04
Painting
- Light reflectance value (LRV)
- A number from 0 to 100 describing how much light a color bounces back. Higher reflects more.On a west elevation in this climate, LRV changes how hot a wall gets and how fast the color ages.
- Sheen
- How glossy a dried paint film is, measured as gloss units at a fixed angle. Flat, eggshell, satin and semi-gloss are bands on that scale.Higher sheen washes better and hides less. It shows every flaw in the surface underneath it.
- Masonry primer
- A primer formulated for the high alkalinity of fresh cement surfaces, which would otherwise attack an ordinary paint film.Painting new stucco before it has cured is how a repaint becomes a redo.
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