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Home > Archive > Jul 12, 2007

Tommy Gun Stucco Shoots for Quality
By Cami Cox
Staff Writer
An Ivins husband-wife team used to spend their days restoring houses. These days, their mission is strictly stucco.
Bill and Cindy Voorhis are the proprietors of Tommy Gun Stucco. Formerly of California, they have been in the St. George area for five-and-a-half years. The two have been in the construction business for more than 30 years, but a consistent problem they began encountering after moving to Southern Utah prompted them to form a stucco-only business.
“Consistently, for five-and-a-half years we've been fixing this,” Bill Voorhis said. “Stucco is not supposed to come apart.”
The Voorhises said improper stucco application has caused a lot of problems for homeowners in the St. George area. Even in million-dollar homes, cracking and crumbling stucco has become an issue for residents, and the Voorhises spend the majority of their workdays repairing the resultant damage.
“We appreciate people and where they're coming from,” Bill Voorhis said. “We hear their frustrations, and they don't know what to do or how to do it.”
Enter Tommy Gun Stucco, so named for the $40,000 stuccoing machine the Voorhises use to “shoot” stucco onto buildings.
“It's like bulletproofing your house,” Bill Voorhis said.
Tommy Gun Stucco applies stucco to new homes, but they spend a great deal of their time fixing existing stucco problems for homeowners.
“Sixty to 70 percent of the houses that we've worked on have had substandard stucco jobs,” Bill Voorhis said.
There are several contributing factors to the local stucco problems, he said. Some common mistakes made in the stucco application process often lead to the problematic spider-web cracking and crumbling of homes within a few years of their being built, which is why the business of fixing stucco has been so plentiful for the Voorhises.
“It's just really difficult to tighten them back up once they're like that,” Bill Voorhis said.
Tommy Gun Stucco recently repaired the home of a Kayenta resident whose million-plus-dollar house was having a great deal of stucco trouble. In addition to cracks throughout the home's exterior and on an outside stucco wall, stuccoing above the garage had completely crumbled and fallen off. Unfortunately, Bill Voorhis said, this kind of problem is common.
Builders and homeowners will quite often hire someone to stucco a house based on price alone, not qualification or certification of the worker, he said. Many times, workers hired to apply stucco are not even licensed to do so, but they offer labor at the lowest rate and are subsequently hired. But going for the lowest price can come back to haunt a homeowner.
“There's a big difference in that lowest bid, because you're going to get the cheapest stuff every inch of the way,” Bill Voorhis said.
Another problem is that in this area, stucco is commonly applied over foam paneling in a one-step process of basecoat application and acrylic finish. If the foam paneling is not properly conjoined and the seams adequately covered, the applied stucco will settle into the seams, promoting eventual cracking and crumbling, Bill Voorhis said. Use of foam at all is less than ideal, he said, because it is an unstable material.
“It just opens up an avenue for too many problems,” he said. “No builder would think of pouring a foundation on foam. It would crack horrifically, and stucco is no more than a vertical slab of cement.”
The ideal method for applying stucco and making it last, he said, is a three-step process of applying straight stucco as the base, rather than foam, and then following it up with a scratch-coat, a basecoat and a finish coat – a process that is too seldom used.
“Stucco buildings are supposed to be pretty thick,” Bill Voorhis said. “The stucco on a building is like the envelope to a house. It's like your skin.”
In addition to stucco being applied too lightly, resulting in a veneer-like thickness rather than a durable and solid thickness, stucco is also commonly applied by hand, not machine, he said. This leads to uneven application, because as workers grow tired applying stucco in the heat, it begins to show on the home's exterior.
“This machine never gets tired,” Bill Voorhis said. “It puts out an incredible amount of material, and it applies the same amount of material to every side of the building, no matter what time of day.”
A few other local stuccoing companies also use machines, he said, but most don't.
An additional problem is that stucco application often continues long after workers should call it quits due to mounting temperatures, Bill Voorhis said. According to the “Portland Cement Plaster/Stucco Manual,” stucco should not be applied in extremely hot weather, as its flash set point is 120 degrees. On a 117 or 118 degree summer day in Southern Utah, stucco can easily exceed that temperature, hardening in the bucket or on the wall before workers can properly smooth it out with a darby tool. This leads to waviness and instability as the end result.
The bottom line, Bill Voorhis said, is homeowners should know what to watch for when purchasing a home and when having it stuccoed, and those applying stucco should take the proper measures to make sure the job done is a quality one.
“Make it better; make it stronger,” Bill Voorhis said. “We would like to be the forerunners of a whole new trend of quality in stucco application.”
He said the number one concern he and his wife have is that, wherever they go to get the job done, local residents get a good job when it comes to stucco.
“Just get somebody to do it right,” Bill Voorhis said.

To contact Tommy Gun Stucco, call 313-8205.

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