A small metal diverter at the roof-wall junction sends water into the gutter. Leave it out and you rot the wall behind it.
Repair and full remediation, every time. You see both numbers.
Probe data sets the scope - not a salesman, not the finish.
Send your report; we tell you what it actually requires.
The most expensive EIFS repairs we see all start with a part that costs about thirty dollars.
Where a roof edge meets a wall that keeps going up, roof runoff pours straight down the roofline and hits that wall. A kickout is a small angled piece of metal flashing set at the bottom of that junction. Its only job is to kick the water sideways, out and into the gutter, instead of letting it run down behind the cladding.
It is not complicated. It is not expensive. And on older EIFS it gets left off constantly.
On a wall with a drainage plane, water that sneaks behind the cladding can weep back out. Older EIFS has no such escape, as we cover in why EIFS fails on the Cape Fear coast. So when there is no kickout, every rain funnels a concentrated stream of roof water directly into the sheathing at the exact base of that roof-wall junction. Not a light mist. A firehose, aimed at the one spot the wall cannot drain.
That is why a missing kickout is the number one documented moisture entry point on EIFS homes. It concentrates the most water at the worst possible location, and it does it every single time it rains.
You can check this one yourself from the ground. Walk to any spot where a lower roof or a porch roof runs into a taller wall section.
The damage is always bigger than the surface suggests. By the time staining shows, the rot behind the board has usually spread up and out from the junction. Nobody plans for a five-figure repair that started at a missing metal strip, and finding out during a home sale is a gut punch. A moisture inspection puts a number on it before the board ever comes off.
A Leland home, EIFS, a second-story wall rising above a garage roof. No kickout was ever installed there. From the street the wall looked clean. The moisture reading at that inside corner was off the chart, and when the board came off, the sheathing had rotted well up the wall behind it. One thirty-dollar part, left off at the original build, quietly fed water into that corner for two decades.
Adding a kickout to a wall that is already rotted does not undo the damage. The correct repair is to open the wall, replace the failed sheathing, install the kickout and proper flashing, and close it back up with a system detailed to actually drain. Whether your junction needs a simple flashing correction or full sheathing replacement depends on what the moisture readings show at that spot. Send us your inspection report and we will tell you which one you are looking at.
Ask any EIFS inspector where they point the meter first, and it is the roof-wall junctions. They know the design. They know that is where the water concentrates and where the kickout was most likely skipped. A report that shows normal readings across the field of the wall but elevated numbers at the inside corners is not a mystery. That is a missing kickout writing its signature into the sheathing. When you read your report, look at those corner readings before anything else.
People assume this is only an old-house problem. It is not. Kickouts still get left off on newer builds, because they are small, easy to forget, and invisible once the gutter goes up. The part costs almost nothing and the labor is minutes. It gets skipped anyway. If you are buying a home of any age with EIFS, check the junctions yourself and make sure the inspection probes them.
Upload the inspection report or photos of the readings. We tell you what it actually requires - repair or full remediation - honestly, before your closing date does.