Drywall & Plaster Repair in The Heights, Houston

Why walls crack in a pier-and-beam house

In a slab house, wall cracks usually track slab movement. In a pier-and-beam Heights house they track the wood floor structure. When a pier settles or a beam or joist loses bearing, that part of the floor drops slightly, the wall framing above it racks, and the finish — plaster or drywall — cracks where the stress concentrates, typically the corners of doors and windows.

That's why a crack that keeps reopening at the same corner after it's been patched usually isn't a bad patch. It's active movement under the house, and until the pier or the bearing under that spot is dealt with, the crack will keep coming back no matter how well it's filled. We tell you honestly when what you're looking at is cosmetic and when it's worth looking under the floor first — sometimes the right sequence is the crawl space, then the wall.

Plaster and lath, not just drywall

Many original Heights homes still have plaster over wood lath, not drywall. It behaves differently: it's harder and more brittle, it's thicker, and it fails differently — it cracks, and it can also delaminate, where the plaster loses its grip on the lath and comes loose in a section that sounds hollow when you tap it.

A plaster repair that blends into the surrounding wall is a different job than swapping a sheet of drywall. Delaminated plaster has to be re-secured, or the failed section cut out and rebuilt to match thickness and texture, not just skimmed over. Where drywall is patched into a plaster wall, the thickness difference has to be built up so the patch sits flush. We repair plaster as plaster rather than boarding over it, and we tell you which you have.

The repair itself

Cracks, holes, water-stained ceilings, failed plaster, and texture matching. On any repair, matching the surrounding texture and priming before paint is what keeps a patch from flashing through the finish. Older Heights walls are often smoother hand-finished plaster rather than the sprayed textures on newer builds, and matching that takes hand work.

Where water is involved — a stain on a ceiling, a soft spot on a wall — we look for where it came from before closing it up, because in these houses that can be a roof issue above or, on a lower wall, moisture from the crawl space below.

The historic district

Interior drywall and plaster repair is inside the house and doesn't change the exterior, so it doesn't trigger the Certificate of Appropriateness process that governs exterior changes in the Heights historic districts. It would only come into play if the wall work were part of something exterior — a wall opened because of a siding or roof issue, where the exterior fix is what falls under the ordinance. City of Houston permits apply to the work that requires them.

Working in an occupied home

Drywall and plaster sanding makes fine dust that travels, so the work area is sealed off with plastic and the dust is contained and vented rather than left to settle through the house, with cleanup at the end of each day. We work to a schedule and tell you what each day involves, and keep the work to the area it belongs in. Plaster demolition — where a failed section has to come out — is dustier and noisier than a drywall patch, and we tell you up front when that's what a repair involves.