Drywall & Plaster Repair in Chapel Hill, NC

Why so many of these calls start with a stain

Chapel Hill is wooded in a way most of the Triangle is not, and that single fact drives a surprising amount of our drywall work here.

Mature canopy over a roof means leaf litter in the gutters and in the valleys. Gutters that are holding leaves are not moving water; they are storing it. Water sitting behind a fascia or backing up under a shingle edge finds its way in, and the first thing anyone sees is a ring on a ceiling near an outside wall.

The same canopy keeps roofs and north-facing walls damp for longer after rain, which gives any small defect more time to matter.

So in this town the sensible order is: find out where it came from, stop it, then repair. Patching first is money spent twice, and we would rather tell you that than take the easier booking.

Working out what you actually have

Three questions, and they are quick to answer on site.

Is it still wet? A moisture meter answers this in seconds. A stain that is bone dry and has not changed in a year is a cosmetic problem. One that reads damp is an active one.

Is the board sound? Press it. Drywall that has been wet and dried repeatedly loses its integrity — it goes soft, the paper delaminates, and it will not hold a finish no matter how well it is skimmed. Soft board comes out.

Where did it come from? Directly above is the obvious guess and often wrong. Water runs along the top of a ceiling, down a rafter, along a joist and drops where it finds a seam. The stain marks the exit, not the entry.

Sealing, not painting

This is the single most common mistake we get called back to correct.

A water stain painted over with ordinary emulsion looks fine for a fortnight and then comes back through. The minerals and tannins carried by the water sit in the surface and migrate straight through a water-based film. It is not a coverage problem — three coats will not fix it.

What works is a stain-blocking primer, which forms a barrier the stain cannot pass, followed by paint. On a ceiling that has any real staining it is generally worth priming the whole plane rather than spot-priming, because a patch of primer under a sheen finish reads differently in raking light.

The older houses near campus

The Historic District, the streets around campus and Glen Lennox run older than most of what we work on, and the wall surface is frequently plaster over wood lath rather than drywall.

Plaster fails differently. The material itself is usually fine; what lets go are the keys — the plaster that squeezed through the gaps in the lath and hardened behind it. When those break, a section of wall or ceiling loses its grip and moves when you press it, often with a network of cracks around the edge of the loose area.

The repair is to re-secure the plaster to the lath and framing and then match the surface, rather than cutting out the loose section and dropping in a piece of drywall. A drywall patch in a plaster room is flat, and the room around it is not — the join shows in raking light forever, even when the filling is perfect.

Matching a plaster surface is slower and it is what makes the repair disappear. It is also the whole reason people call somebody rather than doing it themselves.

Texture matching

In the newer neighbourhoods — Meadowmont, Southern Village, Briar Chapel — the surface is modern drywall with a sprayed or trowelled texture.

Matching it is a mixing and application problem rather than a filling one. Orange peel, knockdown and a plain skim all need different consistencies and different techniques, and the failure mode is a patch that is technically flat but visibly a different surface at a glancing angle. We match on a piece of scrap first where the repair is anywhere prominent.

Rental turnovers

Chapel Hill has more let housing than anywhere else we cover, and turnover patching is straightforward work: anchor holes, doorstop punctures, corner bead damage, the marks furniture leaves.

Booked as one visit it costs considerably less than a string of separate call-outs. Send the whole list and the whole property at once.

What we will not do

If a ceiling is sagging over a wide area, if the framing is involved, or if the water is coming from something that needs a permit to fix, that is not our job and we will say so at the start rather than halfway through. Knowing where somebody stops is worth more than a list of everything they claim to do.

Getting a price

Photograph the damage, then photograph it again from a few feet back so we can see the whole ceiling or wall and where it sits relative to the outside walls. Tell us whether it is still spreading, and whether the walls are plaster or drywall.

Chapel Hill is about thirty-five minutes from us. There is no travel charge, but a single small patch will meet the minimum on its own, so it is worth sending everything at once.