Drywall Repair near you

A crack is a symptom. Wood framing shrinks as it dries during a house's first heating seasons, then swells and shrinks again with the weather: dry, heated air in winter, humid air in summer. Foundations settle, floors flex under heavy loads, and in some houses the roof trusses lift slightly in winter and pull at the joint between the ceiling and the walls. Drywall is rigid, so it cracks where that movement concentrates, usually at seams and at the corners of openings.

Filling a moving crack with compound alone rarely lasts. A durable repair opens the crack, reinforces it with tape and feathers it out wide; at a ceiling joint that moves with the seasons, a flexible detail or a moulding may work better than more compound. Cracks that keep widening, run diagonally from doors and windows, or come with sticking doors, sloping floors or cracks in the foundation deserve a look from a building professional before any cosmetic repair.

A stain on the ceiling or a bubble in the paint means water got in, and patching or painting over it without finding the source only hides the problem until it returns. The leak can be well away from the stain, since water runs along joists and pipes before it drips. The water leak detection page explains how hidden plumbing leaks are tracked down; a roof, window or ice dam leak calls for the matching trade.

Once the leak is fixed and the area has dried out completely, the state of the board decides the repair.

Sanding or cutting old drywall makes dust, and in older homes that dust can carry asbestos fibres. Health Canada includes drywall and spackling among the surface treatments on its list of materials that may contain asbestos, and notes that asbestos was mainly used in homes before 1990. The Quebec government says asbestos products were used in construction in Quebec mainly between 1930 and 1990, and lists wall and ceiling coatings, patching compound and drywall repairs among the materials that may contain it.

You can't tell by looking. Before sanding, cutting into or tearing out walls and ceilings from that era, have a professional take samples for laboratory analysis. If asbestos is found, the work belongs to a qualified asbestos removal contractor, never to a do-it-yourself weekend. Materials in good condition that are left undisturbed generally don't release fibres, so a small crack can wait until the test results are in.

A repair is only finished when you can't find it: a flat patch, edges feathered wide, a matching texture, primer over the compound and paint carried to a natural break such as a corner. Touching up one spot on an older wall often shows as a shiny or dull halo, even with the original colour.

Many older homes have plaster walls rather than drywall: coats of plaster over wood lath or a rigid backing board. Plaster is harder, denser and quieter than drywall, and it often wraps curved corners and mouldings that drywall can't easily copy. Knock on the wall: plaster sounds solid and feels hard and cold, and a pushpin barely goes in.

Plaster fails differently. Cracks, bulges and sags usually mean it has come loose from the lath, and the fix is to reattach it and fill the cracks, not to spread drywall compound over the top. Replacing a whole wall with drywall is sometimes the practical choice, but it's messy, it disturbs old paint and coatings, and it loses the original character. The plaster repair page covers work on plaster itself.