Hey, what’s up everybody! It’s D-Mac from Family Home Improvements. I’m here in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles – another beautiful day. We’re working on an apartment building that hasn’t been worked on since probably the 1950s or the 1980s. We’re going to be doing a texcote coolwall project here, but we have a lot of stucco damage and a lot of foundational cracks that we’re going to be repairing. And we’re replacing six windows here and hopefully doing the rest at a future time.

In the back of the building, we’re doing some hydro-blasting. They’re going to open up all the cracks in the walls. All of it is going to get peeled off.

We also realized that the walls in this building have some structural cracks. We have to fix that. First, what we’re going to do is add an epoxy injection below. There’s cracks about every 16 inches. They haven’t done anything to this building and it hasn’t been protected from the outside. Through expansion and contraction, you can see exactly where all the wood is. This is a perfect example of expansion and contraction, where your wood is behind the stucco. After the epoxy, what we’d have to do is put a couple of coats of cement before they put on any stucco.

Then, we’ll add a bonding glue to that and then the first coating, which is usually called a scratch coat. All of this is to fix the foundation issues that this building has. After that, we’ll come back with a brown coat that also has a bonding glue in it. Then, we’ll apply the stucco and then refloat it with the bonding glue.

But the main goal is the exterior texcote. The whole wall around the whole building is going to get a primer sealer. Then, we put a special coating on the outside that reflects the heat and the ultraviolet rays. We’ll also be having an electrician come in and changing the panel and installing a few windows that have never been replaced. When we replace those, we’ll end up cutting the seals and adding new retrofit windows. This homeowner wants retrofit windows on the rest of the building and we’ll be there to install them.

There’s extensive damage on this building. We opened up all the cracks by blasting the walls with 35 to 4,000 pounds of pressure. We use an oscillating turbo tip and a zero tip to open up the cracks. We hold the turbo tip at about six inches from the wall and we just start blasting. So whatever stays on is good, and whatever comes off, it’s bad.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this texcote project, and make sure to subscribe and click on your notifications to be the first one to watch it! Follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and we’ll see you next time!

David “D-Mac” Machado