The solution to stucco hairline cracks is to use elastomeric paint. The paint needs to be rolled to force it into the cracks properly. You can spray it on and backroll. That's the best way. Make sure you do 2 full coats. A good quality, 100% acrylic elastomeric paint will fill cracks up to 1/16" wide, and the coating lasts for over 5 years without showing crack. Elastomeric is self-priming on new stucco, meaning you don't need to use a separate primer. It may be a good idea to add a little water to the first coat in order to help it absorb into the pores better. For larger cracks wider than 1/16", use an elastomeric caulk. You may be able to find one with some texture added (like mentioned above) that will belnd in perfectly. I have a house near the coast, in Pacifica, CA. The current paint was done by myself in 2006. 2 walls of my house were new stucco, done rather poorly by unlicensed guys off the street, and the other 2 walls were 50 year old stucco from the original construction. All the walls had severe cracks over the entire surface. Way worse than your photo. I carefully cleaned and prepped the larger cracks with elastomeric caulk, and applied 2 coats of KM-1128 Kel seal Elastomeric paint. 7 years later, it still looks fine. None of the cracks have opened through the surface. You can't even see where they used to be.

Thank you ranco22. I ended up going with a third coat. I was shocked, too, at the amount of paint it took. Soooo wished I'd used a primer first, as I did so on another area and the results were better. IMO, Benjamin Moore is totally misrepresenting their Aura Paint as being "self-priming," at least as far as painting on stucco goes. As a matter of fact, in all of the instances where I have used Aura, the results over a primer were superior to those without using a primer first. Two coats of Aura without a primer and I could still see the previous color through the paint, in addition to the little pin-holes in the finish. I don't have a spray gun, but I still have one large area of very rough stucco left to do and I will either have to get one, or get someone else to paint it who has one.

I know this is an old thread but... I started researching paint removal from stucco after buying our house in 2013. It has two layers of paint- the most recent is a faded cheap Barney purple acrylic and the first is a presumably oil based light gray. I too wish we could turn back time and stop both paint jobs before they happened. Especially the first, which was sprayed on by a less-than-competent painter who painted the slate roof along with the dormer's stucco. He then came back and painted over his mess with a 'slate gray' color- and you can imagine what our roof looks now... I still have a purple house but I have gone down many avenues in search for a solution. There are commercially available paint strippers that will do exactly what you need but they become incredibly expensive when you start looking at the amount needed to do an entire house. Dumond makes several lines of strippers for various surfaces and paint types. More prevalent now are the soy and citrus based strippers that are 'safer' but require multiple applications if there are multiple layers of paint. The good news is that there are more and more contractors specializing in large scale paint removal as more attention is being paid to the importance of restoration/preservation but also with the rise in repurposing industrial buildings throughout various urban areas for housing etc. I was given a quote by a company who sounded knowledgeable and experienced enough to do the job, but the price was simply too high for the house. Sand/media blasting is an option but as noted is a huge cost and mess. I went as far as to make my own alkaline based stripper and wasted a lot of time testing recipes and applications etc. It was labor and time intensive as well as messy and dangerous but cheap. Multiple applications were required but in the end the alkaline stripper disolved the underlying oil based coat, allowing the purple acrylic paint to be powerwashed off with a bit of effort. Still after all my trouble I only completed one gable before calling it quits. If your paint will come off just by powerwashing -without damaging your stucco- then by all means take advantage of that situation! Spend some time caulking around windows and doors with silicone (think of using big globs that you can peel out later), duct-tape between storm windows and frames and seal up any possible entry point for water. Mine wouldn't budge with power washing alone but after applying the stripper, I had luck using a rotary surface attachment on my powerwasher wand- it's designed for concrete driveways etc and is awkward to hold up against a wall but it greatly reduces the mess. I am now planning to use a mineral paint over our painted stucco. After working inside and out of this house for 5 years, I have concluded that the two poorly applied layers of paint aren't causing any serious issues with breathability- as long as they arent continuously added to! This house is old and drafty and there is plenty of ventilation behind our stucco as it doesn't reach below our brick foundation and is open into the soffits/eave cavities and roof system etc... It gets enough air. This is also helped by the fact our stud bays are not filled with insulation or foam, there are no vapor barriers, and our climate isn't terrible... Where are you now with your stucco project?

Thank you for the reply! I didn't take a picture of the areas before they painted because I didn't know it was going to be an issue. I posted the first picture to give an idea of what shape the stucco was in with the weathering. My concern with the new paint is that it looks swirly and uneven.