What to check on a Florida exterior before the wet season

A walkaround for Florida homeowners: weep screed, sealant joints, kickout flashing, gutters, grading, sprinklers, and the interior signs of a leak.

An hour outside on a dry day, with binoculars and something to write on, will find nearly every route water takes into a Florida house. Seven things are worth the walk: the gap between the bottom of the stucco and the ground, the sealant joints around windows, doors and every penetration, the flashing where a roof edge dies into a wall, the roof edge itself with its soffit, fascia and gutters, where the downspouts and the sprinklers actually put water, the face of the wall between all of that, and the inside of your exterior walls. What follows is what to look for at each one, and which findings can wait.

Florida's wet season runs roughly June through September, and the Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30 with its most active stretch from mid-August through mid-October. The reason to walk the house before the heavy weather rather than after is that most of what you will find costs nothing to fix. A shovel, a sprinkler nozzle and a downspout extension take an afternoon. The same problems found in November have usually already put water into a wall.

Start where the wall meets the ground

On a wood-framed house, the bottom edge of the stucco should have a weep screed: a thin perforated metal strip running the whole way around, with a lip and a row of small holes. It is the exit. Water that gets behind the finish coat is supposed to run down the drainage plane and out through those holes.

Two things to check. First, can you see it at all? The screed is meant to sit at least four inches above earth and at least two inches above a paved surface. Those gaps close quietly. Fresh mulch, a new flower bed, a raised planter, re-sodding, a paver patio or a poured walkway will all bury a screed that was correct the day the house was built, and once it is buried the wall cannot drain and wet soil sits directly against the lath. Second, are the holes open? Painters fill them, and so does anyone who caulks the bottom of a wall to tidy the line.

The fix for a buried screed is a shovel, and it is the cheapest item on this list. Pull soil and mulch back to bare the metal and re-slope the bed away from the house. If the stucco runs straight down into concrete or dirt with no screed visible, note it rather than assume the worst: many Northeast Florida homes are concrete block with stucco applied directly to the block, and they are detailed differently. What that wall does need is an intact base, because it has no drainage cavity to forgive a leak.

While you are down there, look for a dirty band across the bottom eight inches of the wall. That is soil thrown up by rain hitting hard ground, and splashback is one of the most reliable causes of stucco breaking down at the base of a wall.

Check every sealant joint, then check the top corners twice

Wherever stucco meets a different material, there has to be a flexible joint. Window and door frames, garage door jambs, hose bibs, dryer vents, electrical boxes, exterior light bases, the meter can, the AC line set where it enters the wall, and every bracket somebody screwed into the wall for a camera or a flag.

Good sealant is continuous, still rubbery under a fingernail, and stuck to both sides of the gap. Failed sealant looks like one of four things: hardened and cracked along its length, pulled cleanly away from one side, split down the middle, or simply missing at the corners. Press it. If it is brittle, or a gap opens when you push, it is done.

Spend the extra minute on the head of each window, meaning the top, and on the two upper corners. That is where wind-driven rain concentrates and where diagonal cracking tends to start. If you are trying to tell a crack that matters from one that does not, which cracks are worth acting on covers that in detail.

Three mistakes to avoid. Do not lay new caulk over failed caulk, because it will not bond to a weathered surface and it hides the gap underneath. Do not use silicone on stucco: it will not take paint, it stands out permanently, and it has to be cut out before a proper repair can be made. And do not seal across the bottom of a window frame. Aluminum and vinyl windows have weep holes in the sill that let water out of the frame, and caulking that line traps water inside the window rather than keeping it out.

A joint done properly is a defined gap with backer rod pushed in behind it so the bead is roughly half as deep as it is wide and can stretch. A smear troweled across the surface is not a joint, and it will fail in a season.

Find every place a roof edge runs into a wall

This is the detail that does the most damage on stucco, and you can check it from the ground.

Where a sloped roof runs up alongside a wall, water sheets down the roof and along that junction. Step flashing carries it, and at the bottom of that run, where the roof edge ends at the wall, a kickout flashing is supposed to be there to throw the water sideways into the gutter. If the kickout is missing, every drop from that roof plane runs straight down the face of the wall at one concentrated point, and on stucco it goes behind the finish rather than over it.

Look at the bottom of every roof-to-wall run: the sides of dormers, chimneys and bump-outs, a porch or garage roof that ties into a second-storey wall. There should be a visible bent piece of metal at the low end diverting water out. Below that point, a vertical stain stripe, a green algae streak, a darker band, blistered paint, or a soft spot are the signature of a missing or failed kickout. Step flashing should run about four inches up the wall and four inches over the roof.

If you find this one, it is not a caulking job. Correcting it means cutting the stucco back at the junction and rebuilding the flashing. It is also worth finding, because it is a small repair now and a wall rebuild later. Use binoculars from the ground and stay off the roof.

Work along the roof edge: soffit, fascia and gutters

The soffit is the underside of the overhang and the fascia is the board behind the gutter. Peeling or bubbling soffit paint, a panel that has sagged or stained, or a soffit that has pulled away from the wall all mean water is getting past the roof edge. Rot in the fascia usually shows first at the corners where the gutter miters, because that is where a blocked gutter backs up.

Check the gutters for debris, sagging sections and separated seams. If you can watch the house during a rain, do that instead, because a gutter tells you more running than empty. Overflow over the front lip means it is blocked. Overflow behind the gutter is worse: that water runs down the fascia and in behind the wall, which is exactly the path you spend the rest of this list trying to close.

Also look at the gap where the soffit meets the wall. A run of open joint there lets wind-driven rain and insects straight into the overhang.

Follow the water: downspouts, grading and sprinklers

Three things decide where the water your roof collects actually ends up.

Downspouts. Find the bottom of every one and ask where the water goes. A splash block that drops it a foot from the foundation is nearly the same as having no downspout, and a downspout dumping onto a lower roof without a diverter concentrates the flow and wears the shingle. Extend the discharge well clear of the wall or tie it into a drain. The tell that one is misbehaving is a scoured trench in the bed beneath it or a fan of soil spatter on the wall above.

Grading. The ground should fall away from the house, and the standard is six inches of fall within the first ten feet. Hard surfaces within that ten feet should slope away at two percent or better. Look for the opposite: soil settled tight against the foundation, a patio poured with a slight backfall, an AC pad that has sunk, a raised bed built up against the wall. The clearest test is free. After a heavy rain, walk out and look for anywhere a puddle is still sitting against the wall an hour later.

Irrigation. Run each zone and stand back and watch it. Any head throwing water onto the wall is watering your house several times a week, every week, all year. That produces a permanently damp band at exactly the height of the spray, then efflorescence, algae, and paint that fails on one elevation while the rest of the house looks fine. The correction is a nozzle swap, an arc adjustment or moving one head, and it may be the highest-value ten minutes in this whole article. Salt air and constant humidity already work against a coastal wall without adding a daily soaking, which is the same mechanism at work in how coastal moisture gets into stucco.

Read the wall itself

Cracks get the attention, but the wall says several other things.

Tap along it with a knuckle or the plastic handle of a screwdriver, gently, working across large areas and around any old repair. Sound stucco sounds solid. A hollow or drummy note means the stucco has lost its bond to the lath or the block behind it, and rain will keep working that section loose. Mark what you find and note how big it is.

Then look for the rest of it. Bulges or waves in a surface that should be flat, especially under a window or beside a downspout. The edges of old patches opening back up. Rust bleeding out of a crack or along a line of fasteners, which means metal behind the wall has been wet long enough to corrode. Chalky white efflorescence, which means water moved through the wall, dissolved salts and left them on the way out. Stain trails running down from anything screwed or cut into the wall, because every one of those is a hole. And run a hand across a painted wall in the sun: heavy chalk on your palm means the coating has broken down and is no longer shedding water.

Then go inside and check the same walls from the other side

The interior is where you learn whether any of this is already past theory. Walk the inside face of your exterior walls, particularly under windows and along the base.

Look for baseboard that has swelled or pulled away from the wall, drywall that feels soft or noticeably cool, a stain with a defined edge like a tide line, a line of nail pops, flooring cupping along the wall, or grout that has gone dark in one strip. Blistering paint on the inside of an exterior wall is a sign of moisture pushing from behind. So is a musty smell in a closet built against an exterior wall, especially one that gets stronger after rain. Check the garage while you are at it, since the walls there are often unfinished and you can see the framing or block directly.

One distinction that saves a lot of money: if a damp patch appears near the air handler or along a condensate line, that is an air conditioning problem. If it appears or worsens only after rain, or only after wind from one direction, it came from outside. Water inside the wall also travels sideways and downward before it surfaces, so the stain indoors is usually not directly behind the entry point outdoors.

Any of these changes the question. It is no longer whether to seal a wall but how far the water has already gone, and that is water damage repair rather than a paint job. If you find a fresh damp spot, what to do first before anyone touches it is worth reading before you cover it up.

What to do first with what you found

Order the list by what water it removes, not by what looks worst.

Free and immediate: pull the mulch and soil off the weep screed, clear the gutters, extend the downspouts, adjust or move any sprinkler head hitting the wall, and regrade the obvious low spots. These carry the biggest loads and cost you an afternoon.

Next, before the rain: sealant joints. Cut out what has failed, do not layer over it, and use a paintable exterior joint sealant rather than silicone.

Then get a professional on the flashing, the hollow areas and anything with an interior sign behind it. Those need the wall opened, and they get worse on a schedule.

Cosmetic work goes last, and one rule matters more than the rest: do not paint, fog coat or seal a wall until you know where the water is getting in. Coating a wall that is already wet does not stop the leak. It traps the moisture where you cannot see it and buys a bigger repair later.

Photograph everything you find, write the date on it, and note the weather when it happened. If a crack or a stain is the thing you are unsure about, mark the ends with a pencil, date the mark, and look again in two months. A stable crack and a growing crack are different problems and no photograph settles that on its own.

Stucco Home Repair does free inspections across Jacksonville, Ponte Vedra, St. Augustine, Nocatee, Palm Coast and Flagler. Bring the photographs and the notes from your walkaround, and we will tell you which items on your list are worth spending money on before the next round of weather and which ones are fine to leave alone.