Drywall & Ceiling Repair in Garner, NC

Ceilings first, because of the test

Garner has a large stock of 1960s to 1980s ranches and split-levels, and a great many of them have sprayed texture on the ceilings — what everyone calls popcorn.

Before any of it gets scraped, there is a question that has to be answered honestly: when was it applied?

Sprayed ceiling texture manufactured and applied before the early 1980s can contain asbestos. A lot of Garner housing dates from exactly that period. Once the material is dry and undisturbed it is not doing anything; scraping it is precisely the activity that would make it a problem.

So the sequence is:

1. Sample and test. A small sample sent to a lab, which is inexpensive and comes back in days.
2. If it is clear, scraping and refinishing is ordinary work and we will quote it.
3. If it is not, that is licensed abatement, it goes to a specialist contractor, and we will tell you so plainly.

We do not scrape untested texture on a house of that age. It is not caution for its own sake — it is the difference between a tidy job and contaminating a house.

If the ceiling is not being removed, repairs to textured ceilings are a different matter and can usually be done without disturbing the wider surface.

The advantage of a house that has stopped moving

Here is the good news about Garner housing, and it genuinely changes the work.

A home built between 1960 and 1985 has finished settling. The framing has given up its moisture, the structure has taken its set, and the seasonal movement that plagues a new build has largely stopped.

That means cracks can be fixed permanently, which is not true everywhere. In a five-year-old house a crack over a doorway is a live joint — repair it and it may well reopen, because the cause is still active. In a Garner ranch the same crack is a historical record of movement that has already happened.

Repaired properly, it stays closed:

• The old material gets cut back to sound edges rather than filled over
• Tape gets bedded across the line so the repair has tensile strength
• Three thin coats feathered wide, rather than one thick bead, so there is no ridge in raking light
• Texture matched where there is texture

That is a different job from running filler into a crack with a knife, and it is why the ones that were filled three times keep coming back.

Panelling, and what is behind it

A good share of Garner homes still have original dark sheet panelling on at least one wall — a family room, a den, the lower level of a split-level.

When it comes off, there are two possibilities and they are very different jobs:

Over finished drywall. Common where a room was updated rather than built that way. The sheets come off, adhesive residue gets scraped, and the wall gets a skim to even out what is left. A day or so and it is an ordinary wall.

Straight onto studs. Also common, particularly on lower levels. Here the panelling was the wall. Take it off and there is framing and insulation and nothing else, which means new board, taping and a full finish before anything can be painted.

Pulling a small section at an edge or in a corner answers it in five minutes, and it is worth doing before anyone commits to a price.

The rest of the older-house list

Fixture and fitting holes. Sixty years of things being hung and taken down. Filled properly in thin coats so they do not shrink back.

Corner bead damage. Metal bead in older houses rusts if it has ever been wet, and rust bleeds through paint. It gets cut out and replaced rather than filled over.

Ceiling stains. Find the source, stop it, then repair. Firm board dries and takes a stain-blocking primer. Soft board comes out. Ordinary paint over a stain bleeds back through within weeks.

Textured wall finishes. Some houses of this period have a skip-trowel or sand finish on the walls. Matching it is a technique question, and we match on scrap before committing where the repair is prominent.

The newer south side

South and east along the corridors toward Cleveland and Clayton the housing is recent, and the failures there are new-house failures: nail pops as the framing dries out, taped joints opening at the wall-to-ceiling junction, and sprayed texture to match. Different problem, same visit if you have both.

Getting a price

Photograph each area close up and once from a few feet back with light raking across it. For a ceiling, tell us roughly when the house was built — that is the first question we would ask anyway.

Garner is about half an hour from us, in the same bracket as most of our list.