Drywall Repair near you

A repair that fails twice is answering the wrong question. Plaster and plasterboard are rigid, so they crack where movement is concentrated, which is why cracks so often appear along board joints, at ceiling and wall junctions and diagonally from the corners of doors and windows. Seasonal movement in a building, timber drying out in a newer house, and vibration all produce hairline cracking that filler alone will not hold, because the filler is being asked to be more flexible than the wall.

A durable repair opens the crack out rather than smearing over it, reinforces it where reinforcement is needed, and feathers the finish wide enough that the repair is not a hard-edged patch. Where a junction genuinely moves with the seasons, a flexible detail or a covering trim can be a better answer than more plaster. What matters is telling apart the ordinary cracking that every house does from the kind that needs a professional opinion: cracks that keep widening, cracks that run diagonally and step through masonry, doors and windows that have started to bind, or floors that have gone out of level all deserve advice from a building professional before anyone makes good the decoration.

This is the one rule in British plaster repair that is not negotiable. HSE states that asbestos may be part of any commercial or domestic building built or refurbished before the year 2000, that asbestos was widely used until it was banned in 1999, and it names textured decorative coatings, commonly referred to as Artex, among the materials that may contain it. Where asbestos is suspected, HSE's instruction is to stop work immediately, confirm what it is or assume it is asbestos, and carry out a risk assessment. Sanding a textured ceiling to flatten it, or dry-scraping it off, is exactly the wrong move.

Non-licensed does not mean unrestricted. HSE treats most work on textured coatings as non-licensed provided workers have had appropriate information, instruction and training, and its asbestos essentials task sheets cover drilling and boring through textured coatings, inserting and removing screws through them, removing textured coating from a small area such as one square metre, and cleaning up debris after a coated ceiling has collapsed. Non-licensed work still requires a risk assessment, proper controls and trained workers, and asbestos in air is still subject to the legal control limit. Sprayed asbestos coatings need a licensed contractor. For a homeowner the practical translation is short: if a repair means disturbing a textured coating in a pre-2000 property, say so when you request quotes, and expect a competent contractor to want it identified first.

A wet ceiling is the one plaster problem that can become urgent. Saturated plasterboard or old lath and plaster gets heavy, loses strength and can come down in a sheet with very little warning, so keep people out from underneath a bulging or sagging ceiling and do not switch on light fittings in the affected area. The immediate job is to stop the water, not to assess the plaster.

Government guidance on damp is a useful way to think about the cause. It describes traumatic damp as leaking water from waste and heating pipes, overflowing baths or sinks; penetrating damp as water entering from outside because of defects in walls, roofs, windows or floors; rising damp as moisture from the ground; and condensation as moisture generated inside the home condensing onto colder parts. The same guidance is clear that simply removing surface mould will not stop damp and mould reappearing and that the underlying cause has to be tackled. Water also travels along joists and pipes before it drips, so the stain is often not below the leak.

A repair is finished when you cannot find it, and that is largely about what happens before the final coat. Loose material is cut back to something sound, because plaster will not bond to a crumbling edge. Cracks are raked out. Joints and junctions are reinforced with scrim tape where they need it. A damaged external corner gets a new bead rather than a thicker smear of filler. Where the background is porous or unstable it is treated first, and the build-up may be a backing coat before a finish coat rather than one heavy application.

Then the surface is brought level with the surrounding wall and worked as it sets, which is the part that separates a plasterer from a filler-and-sandpaper job. Large holes in a hollow wall are backed and patched with board rather than bridged with filler. When the repair is dry, new plaster takes a thinned mist coat before full emulsion, and paint is usually carried to a natural break such as a corner, because a spot touch-up on an older wall almost always shows as a different sheen.

If you want to compare plasterers, LokalMatch takes the details once. You describe the damage, the room, the age of the property and whether there is a textured coating or a known leak involved, and matched plasterers covering your postcode contact you directly. The professionals pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not carry out repairs, does not set prices and does not vet, rank or recommend anyone, so ask each plasterer how they intend to deal with the cause as well as the damage.

There are three honest answers to a damaged wall, and the cheapest one is not always the one that costs least over five years. A localised patch suits isolated damage on a wall that is otherwise sound and will be repainted anyway. Re-skimming the whole wall or ceiling makes sense when the surface has many repairs, an uneven history of patching, or a texture you want gone, because a single skim gives one continuous face instead of a map of patches that shows under a raking light. Over-boarding, where new plasterboard is fixed over the existing surface and then finished, is the usual answer to a ceiling that is in poor condition or carries a textured coating best left undisturbed.

Lath and plaster deserves its own thought. In an older property, ceilings and walls built as plaster on timber laths are part of how the building works and often carry original mouldings and cornices. They fail by losing their key, the plaster squeezing between the laths that holds it up, which is why they sag rather than simply crack. Reattaching and repairing sound lath and plaster is a specialist job worth doing where the fabric is historic; stripping it out and reboarding is quicker and cheaper but permanent, messy, and it disturbs everything that is up there, including old coatings and old paint.

The materials in a plaster repair are chosen for the background, not for convenience. A backing or bonding coat builds out depth on a masonry wall or fills a deeper recess; a finish plaster goes on thin and is trowelled up as it sets; a lightweight filler is for small dents and nail holes rather than for structural gaps; and scrim tape, corner beads and stop beads give the repair a clean edge and a reinforced line. Using a finish plaster where a backing coat was needed is a common shortcut, and it shows up as cracking and hollowness a season later.

Dust is the other material question, because the sanding and cutting matter to whoever is living in the house. HSE says regularly breathing construction dust can cause diseases like lung cancer, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and silicosis. Where a repair involves cutting into masonry rather than board, the exposure is more serious again: HSE notes silica is a major constituent of construction materials such as bricks, tiles, concrete and mortar, and that dust is generated during common tasks including cutting, drilling, grinding and polishing. Expect the area to be sealed off and extraction or suppression used, rather than a sweeping brush and an open window.

One more thing hides on older walls and woodwork: lead in the paint layers. Public health guidance states that lead paint was common before the 1970s and has not been used after 1992, that UK paint of that era may have contained up to 50% lead by weight, and that exposure is only likely if the paint is deliberately removed or sanded during redecoration. It also notes that children with elevated blood lead levels may have inhaled dust and fumes from old paint removal during redecoration of older properties, and suggests short-term measures such as preventing access to the room or covering the area.

Because plaster repair so often runs into old paintwork at skirting boards, architrave and window reveals, this is worth raising when you book the job rather than discovering it mid-week. HSE advises against overheating leaded paint with blow lamps or gas torches, says to keep hot air guns and infrared equipment below 500 degrees Celsius, and points to wet abrasive paper with a scraper or on-tool extraction with an H or M class unit instead of methods that generate dust and fume. The Control of Lead at Work Regulations 2002 sit behind this for anyone employing people to do it, requiring a suitable and sufficient risk assessment before work liable to expose employees to lead.