I am renovating my son's bedroom and trying to make the walls as nice as is reasonable before repainting. There are a few cracks like this in the paint. It looks like on top of the drywall there is paint, wallpaper, and then a few more layers of paint. The cracks could be at the seams of the drywall from expansion and contraction. They could be at the seams of the wallpaper. They could be something else. Most of the cracks come straightish down below the sides of windows, which makes me think drywall seams.
I gouged out one crack and filled it with joint compound to see how that works. Since the drywall is old, it was really hard to tell if this is at a drywall seam or not - there are places where previous work, maybe mouse damage, and who knows what else has made the drywall crumble from behind. These are the joys of an older house!
How would you handle this?
I dont think just filling it with joint compound would be enough, since its breaking from ongoing house movment.
I've used Drywall Joint Tape to properly repair these, allowing ongoing house movement without these cracks reoccuring.
Its defiantly more labor intensive, since you need to apply drywall plaster to spread over, then sand it down smooth, before doing a larger paint.
I grabbed some tape and will do that repair. Thankfully, I have taped drywall before so this is not new. I don't think my wife will be thrilled that this is going to add a day or two until we can paint, but she will agree that it is better to do it right than fast.
If you get setting compound (the powder you mix with water rather than the pre-mix stuff), it sets much quicker, and you can sand and paint the same day
Ditto this. I use Easy Sand 45. You get 45 minutes to work, before it sets up. Definitely ready to paint the same day. I also recommend folding your tape in half and tearing off the hard edge. When I do this, I find the tape to be a bit more forgiving and easier to hide. Cheers!
Thank you for that tip!
Of note, that stuff works great, but you need to be very sparing with it, as it very difficult to sand compared to the premixed stuff. Make sure you have it as close to the way you want it to look as you are able before you let it dry. A lot of drywallers use this stuff for pre-filling poor, uneven drywall board work before taping, as it is very hard stuff. But it can take a lot longer to dry that way than the bag would suggest. Sheetrock 90 turned into Sheetrock Maybe Tomorrow in my kitchen reno after I used it to replace sections along the edges of some damaged drywall that tore out when I removed the old tile backsplash.
Take a rasp and putty knife and try to remove some material (not into the drywall, just take off paint and mud layers) so that you have a recessed area for the tape the go. This will prevent you from needing to build out the area so much to hide the repair, and is very necessary at the edge of the corner bead otherwise the metal edge that forms the corner won't actually be the corner anymore (so there'll be a weak and ugly "wave" in the line of the corner).
Personally I don't think you would need the tape. It's usually for the gaps between sheets of drywall which can be significantly wider than these cracks. You should be fine just filling with the drywall compound and sanding.
For this you might end up seeing the thickness of the tape beneath the new layer of paint afterwards.
defiantly