Sunny Mother Nature has been on our side this week, so we have happily been doing outside work. We applied the final stucco coat on the studio today (See prep details here.) The task seemed easy compared to our expectations.
We masked the window/door trim to prevent the sticky stuff from messing up the cedar.
We learned how to apply the Sto Lotusan stucco coat (water-shedding and self-cleaning during rain!) on the wall that we don’t see often! Made some mistakes, such as working on the sunny side, so that the last patch was too dry by the time we applied its neighbouring patch. The edges were difficult to feather and blend in.
The liquid stucco was custom colour-mixed for us. We used three 20-litre pails of the stucco mix to cover about 400 square feet.
We applied it with a 4″ paintbrush (to a 5 mm thickness, more-or-less) and smoothed it with a rounded-edge trowel. 
That’s it!
D wanted me to post a photo of his gloves – he wants you to think he’s working his fingers to the bone.
All the while, we were both thinking about D’s father. He was a plasterer in a time before drywall, but continued to do stucco work and old-fashioned repairs on plastered interiors after drywall took over.
Coincidently, we laid him to rest exactly one year ago today.
He was a hard worker, honest and intelligent. He never had a chance to get much education himself, but his five children were all given the opportunity to go to university. The characteristic I most valued in him was his sense of duty and responsibility. Although he himself hated hospitals, he would always pay a visit to a close friend or a relative when they were in hospital. For 20 years, he delivered Meals-on-Wheels to people who couldn’t manage to prepare their own meals. When we built our first house, he spent many days working alongside his son. A good, good man, George was (and is) an inspiration to us as we do this work.
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Everything said about George is absolutely true. And another thing: living through the Depression, he disliked consumerism and didn’t own two of anything, except shoes and socks. And he was far less threatening than his photo suggests.