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SURFACE BONDING CEMENT HARDENS LIKE ROCK
Care was taken not to over mix it. The fiberglas starts to fray and will stick out from your walls like they have little hairs all over them. The first mistake we made was not wetting down the concrete block enough before applying. It dried so fast that we could not spread it on thin and wasted it.
This is the inside of the wall. As you can see it is very wet. We trowled all of the walls with hand trowels. We started from the bottom and worked up and over. It is possible to achieve a smooth texture. Ron and I wanted a rustic look. From the very beginning we knew our home was going to look home made. That was okay with us. We lacked the skills for it to look anything other than homemade. We also knew that it would be a well constructed home. You can rent a stucco sprayer that blows it on. Oh yeah, that would have been fun. Ron and I would have looked the the Pillsbury Dough boy and stuck where we last used the sprayer. These machines are a few thousand dollars to buy. After applying the Quikwall wet down walls several times over the next couple of days and it will help it cure. If you wipe the wall with your hand and residue comes off, it did not cure properly.
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The second mistake we made was wetting down the dry stack concrete block too much creating such a thin layer that it did not cover the block and cracked.
The fibers in the surface bonding cement are what gives the walls their strength. It is applied to both sides of the block wall. We got better as we did a few walls. Of course our patterns and techniques were different and it is quite evident who did what. Since there is only adobe clay as insulation, we are waiting for an entire season of living here before we decide if we need to insulate the outside before we stucco again. So far it is not bad as long as we open and close the house before the temperatures rise.
