Drywall Repair in Alamo Heights, TX for Old Plaster and Newer Board

In Alamo Heights the Wall Behind Your Paint Is Often Plaster

Alamo Heights has the oldest streets we work, and that settles a good part of the job before anybody opens a bucket. So the first thing we do on a drywall repair in Alamo Heights, TX is work out what your wall is actually made of. In plenty of these houses it's plaster over wood lath rather than board, and San Antonio Expert Drywall repairs both. Most of the time the original plaster stays right where it is and one section gets put right, which is a smaller job than replacing a wall.

How to Tell Plaster From Drywall in Your Own House

You can usually tell without opening anything up. Plaster is thicker and heavier than board, and it sounds solid when you knock on it, where board sounds hollow between the studs. Age shows differently too. Board tends to give you one clean line, and an old plaster wall gives you a fine web of hairlines that wanders instead.

The one worth knowing about is a spot that moves when you press it. Thin strips of wood, called lath, run across the studs behind the surface, and the plaster was pushed through the gaps to grip them. Where that grip has let go, there's a soft patch under your hand. That patch is the part that comes off, and the wall on either side of it is usually sound and stays.

Where a section does have to come out, we cut back to plaster that is still holding. Then the fill goes up in stages, each one drying hard before the next goes over it. That's the part that can't be hurried. On an old wall most of what you're paying for is the time between coats rather than the coats themselves, and it is still a smaller job than most people expect.

Plenty of houses in Alamo Heights are both things at once. Front rooms in original plaster, and a kitchen or a back bedroom in board from a later remodel. The two don't sit at the same thickness, so there's a step where they meet. A repair that ignores that step leaves a ridge you notice every time the afternoon light comes down the hall. We look for that step before we start.

Which Cracks in an Old Alamo Heights Wall Need a Second Look

You're probably wondering whether you're looking at the foundation, and on a house this old that's a fair thing to wonder. Most of what we get called out to see in Alamo Heights isn't. A hairline running out of the top corner of a door frame, in a wall that has stood a very long time, is ordinary. What we'd want a second opinion on is a line that has come back twice in the same place, or a door at the end of the room that has stopped latching. That one we'd rather you put in front of a foundation repair company before anybody puts a trowel on it.

Most of it falls into a handful of things, and none of them on its own means your house is in trouble:

• A fine web of hairlines across an old wall, showing through paint that has been rolled on many times
• A soft area where the surface has floated free of the wood lath behind it
• A straight line down a wall where an older room meets board that went in later
• Cracks along a plain flat ceiling, following the line of a joist above it
• Hairlines out of the top corners of a door casing or a window casing
• A patch somebody else made that reads as a smooth island in a hand-worked wall

A picture of it tells us most of what we need. Send one over and we'll say which of those you've got, and whether it wants a trowel this month or one more wet season of watching behind it first.

Matching an Old Alamo Heights Wall Finish Takes a Trowel

The finish on an old wall here was hand-troweled, meaning it was floated on and worked by hand. So it has a direction to it: long shallow sweeps, a fine sand float, or flat plates with bare hollows between them. A gun can't copy that, and the repairs that show worst on these streets are the ones where somebody tried.

So you'll see us practicing on a spare piece of board before a trowel goes near the wall, standing it up beside yours until the sweep of it runs the same way. In most of these rooms the light that settles it is daylight coming in low from one side. The rooms that were redone in board are the other half of the job, and they carry sprayed finishes like the rest of the metro. One is orange peel, sprayed on fine and left standing however it landed. The other is knockdown, where a wide blade goes back over that spray and pushes it down, so the wall reads as broad soft shapes rather than grain.

One house here can want a trowel in the hall and a gun in the kitchen. Both are ordinary work for us, and the price says which rooms wanted which.