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I am an experienced do it yourselfer here in Southern California. I patching a 7' x 7' area on the side of my home. I cut out the area with a saw and then put up new tar paper tucking it behind the old stucco as best I could. Then I put up lath over the area. The city "caught" me working on it so I had to get a permit. I was just about to put the scratch coat on when the inspector said I need 6" vertical and 4" horizontal overlap of tarpaper with counter flashing. I can't really afford to hire a contractor right now, and obviously I need to get my home buttoned back up. So, can you explain to me what the inspector meant? I think he wants to see me fail because he didn't want to explain it to me. I hope to hear back from you soon :)

You did the same thing we do. This makes me glad we don't have stucco inspection here.

It is almost impossible to cut the edges of the stucco back without ripping the tar paper. We just tuck our tarpaper, or our peel and stick rubber membrane as close as we can. It is impossible to underlap the stucco without pulling the stucco loose.

If you stop and think, any water that penetrates the stucco runs straight down, and doesn't turn and run behind the tarpaper.

We work on old houses here in the Washington, DC area that never had tarpaper. We are replacing the stucco on a house now that was built in 1917 that never had any paper. The reason the stucco was failing was leaking windows.

We just finished replacing the pebble dash stucco on the side of a house built in 1914. The original house had a paper, but not tarpaper. The stucco was failing because a window installation from probably the 1970's was leaking and had a sloppy patch around the window. Also, sloppy stucco from remodeling and an addition warranted tearing it all out.

This sounds like abuse of authority. Maybe if you got some sort of permit you can get them off your back.

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