Identify this weird construction material!

Sorry about the vague thread title, but I’m a little confused myself at the moment.

My (real) stucco house has had the porch enclosed at some point during its life, and a few weeks ago I started noticing that the stucco on the porch walls seemed to be peeling away from its backing. Obviously not stucco after all, I thought to myself, and visions of EIFS nightmares started swirling in my head.

While I debated the best way to address the problem, the peeling started to crack, and the crack became a hole. Today I stuck my eye down there and realized that whatever was behind this fake stucco was hard as a rock, and not at all like the styrofoam backing that I had read EIFS uses.

Determined to figure out what I’m dealing with here, I started peeling away the material that had detached from the wall. Underneath it, I was surprised to find… real stucco?

Can somebody help me figure out what’s going on here? Does this look like unpainted stucco, with some sort of cladding added to make the texture match the rest of the house? Is it some bizarre form of EIFS with which I am not familiar? Should I just paint it and forget about it? Perhaps you’d like to see a picture, yes?


This is the wall in question. That dark spot on the far left is where I used expanding foam to try to adhere the material to its backing. You can see how well that worked.


This is the stuff underneath the cladding. It looks like stucco and is quite solid. In fact, it’s even got a few cracks in it. That doesn’t look like any styrofoam I’ve ever seen.


This is the back side of the material that I peeled off the wall.

I’m crossing my fingers and hoping someone can assure me that I don’t need a porchectomy or something. Halp!

Huh. It looks like they wanted to fix the first layer of stucco, but instead of using lathe they used skimcoat and blew texture over it.

My guess is it is a cement board siding underneath. For some reason they plastered stucco over it. People do all types of things to their homes sometimes there is a good reason for it other times there isn’t

Cement board is a bit more common in commercial constriction but has made its way onto a number of homes. More recently cement board planks that look like wood have become a popular choice.

Cement board is basically concrete reinforced with fiberglass. It can be made in many sizes and a huge selection of textures.

It certainly feels like concrete, although it looks a bit too white. I suppose it’s made white during manufacturing?

If it is just concrete, I guess I’ll just slap a coat of green paint on it and consider it a crisis averted. Thanks for the quick response, y’all. If anyone has anything to add, please do! This whole masonry business is new to me.

Yeah cement board can be manufactured in almost any color.