I'm starting to paint the kitchen nook this weekend. The kitchen needs quite a bit of work, since it's the one room the previous owners remodeled in their special way. I decided that to do the whole kitchen at once is just too overwhelming, so I'm doing it in small pieces.
The big problem is that the drywall on the ceiling of the nook is cracked down the seams and along the edges. Does this mean they didn't nail it properly? How do I locate the nails? And when I repair it with joint compound, should I use the paper tape or the mesh tape? I'd really appreciate some perspectives on this issue. Our (former) contractor just said to caulk the little cracks and "float" the larger ones without tape. We already know he takes many shortcuts, and we don't trust his opinion.
I tried to take some good enhanced photos so the cracks can be seen. In the second photo, you can see the sheetrock cracking all along the seams on top and in the middle where the sheetrock meets the edge of the nook.
And for reference, here is a shot of the kitchen before we moved in. Since the light is so nice in the back of the house, you can't really see the soy sauce explosion, the cracks and staining from a roof leak on the wall, the grease on the ceiling, or the various other problems. You can see, however, the kountry kute apple wallpaper border which was the very first thing to go bye-bye when we took possession of the house. I was, in fact, surreptitiously peeling it off even before we moved in. There are some indignities one shouldn't suffer. The curtains went to Goodwill. The hanging light is currently in our dining room until we can get one we like. It replaced a filthy, giant paper globe. *shudder*
From the cracks, I see that the sheetrock is two panels wide, and it is about 3/4" thick, on top of what I think must be plywood that is 2" thick.Any help would be very much appreciated.
3 comments:
When dealing with cracks we generally will take a flat head screwdriver and gouge out the cracks a little bit to open them up a bit more. This way the new plaster can get in it a bit easier. If these are cracks that might reform easily, I'd use the mesh tape and put about 3 thin coats of plaster over it. If you think that the ceiling is coming loose, you might want to put a few more drywall screws in it before you start your repairs so you don't keep running into the problem every few years. If you're trying to find the nails or screws, you might try a studfinder. Studfinders are just metal detectors...I don't know if it would work best, but it's all I can think of right off hand. Hope this helps a bit...we've had our fair share of cracks! Good luck with it!
Our old plaster walls still are and always will be settling (house built on a filled swamp) so I use mesh tape, with a few coats of drywall compound over those cracks. Two of our rooms' walls have been covered over with drywall by previous renovators, using paper tape. Since the plaster underneath wasn't removed, the boards shift and the papered seams have become ugly ridges, dropping chunks of patching plaster. I definitely favor the mesh tape and agree with gouging out more of the crack to improve adhesion.
Thanks, Chelsea and Ralph('s House)! I'm definitely making the cracks bigger before mudding. I think what I'll do is use the mesh tape on the long cracks and the paper tape in the seams along the wall and in the corners. I looked at the ceiling more carefully, and it seems I don't need to find the nails/screws -- they never patched them so you can see the indentations! Quelle surprise.
Ralph -- I'm sorry to hear about your crackage. We are on an old "meadow" (read: swamp), too, but surprisingly, our plaster walls are nearly crackless. We have the opposite situation, plaster OVER drywall, from what I can tell. The electrician said that for a short period, the plasterers union was really strong here and insisted that they plaster over the new technology drywall and it makes them very crack-resistant. I'm not sure if all our walls are plaster veneer, but they're hard as hell.
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