Drywall Repair in Fountain, CO

A Young Town on Old, Restless Ground

Most people picture Fountain as an older place because it was incorporated in 1903, and then they look at the houses. The median Fountain home was built in the year 2000, and nearly half the housing here has gone up since then. That is a young stock by any measure, and younger than the city up the road. So Colorado Springs Expert Drywall reads a Fountain wall differently from one in the Old North End.

What sits underneath it is not young at all. Fountain is on the southern side of El Paso County, on the Pierre Shale, and that formation is the reason your walls are worth understanding rather than just filling. The clay in it takes on water and swells, then dries out and shrinks back, and a foundation riding on that has to go somewhere. A quarter inch of movement down there arrives at your wall as a line above a door.

So the two things are connected. A house built in 2001 has not had time to settle into anything, and the ground under it never settles at all. Which is why drywall repair in Fountain, CO starts with reading the wall rather than filling it, and why the looking and the repairing are priced separately.

What that combination actually looks like inside

Newer houses crack differently from old ones, and Fountain gives us a lot of both problems at once.

The lines turn up in the same three places nearly every time: the top corner of a doorway, the upper corner of a window, and along the joint where a wall meets the ceiling. Those are the thinnest points in any wall and they are where movement finds its way out. On a house of this age they are usually fine hairlines rather than anything dramatic.

The question that matters is whether yours has stopped moving. A crack that opened once, three winters ago, and has looked identical since is a repair and then you forget about it. A crack that has widened over two seasons wants the cause dealt with before anybody closes it, or you will pay for the same repair twice. You get told which one you have, standing in the room, before anything gets decided.

The other Fountain job, which has nothing to do with the ground

There is a second kind of call from down here and it runs on a completely different clock.

Roughly eighty percent of the soldiers at Fort Carson live off post , and a lot of them live in Fountain, out toward Fountain Creek and the Main Street core. Around a quarter of the housing here is rental. Add PCS orders coming through on their own schedule and you get a town with real turnover every single month.

That produces a very specific kind of work, and we do a lot of it:

• Nail holes, anchor holes and bracket damage from a wall of pictures coming down
• Doorknob damage behind a door that opens too far, usually found on the walkthrough
• Corner damage from furniture on the way out rather than on the way in
• Whole rooms tidied up before a move out inspection, priced as one visit
• Patches that have to disappear under the existing finish rather than merely be flat
• Work booked to a date, because a deposit usually depends on it

If you are on a deadline, say so when you call. It changes how the job gets scheduled rather than what it costs, and it is a great deal easier to plan for at the start than halfway through.

If your house has a finished basement

Worth knowing, and most people never get told. Basement walls in El Paso County are built to hang from the framing above with a deliberate gap left underneath, so your concrete slab can lift without taking the wall with it. The giveaway is the baseboard: downstairs it should be fastened to the wall alone and never down into the floor.

Go and look at yours tonight. Nails going down into the slab pin together two things that were meant to slide past each other, and on Fountain's clay that is a fight the ground always wins. It is also a cheaper thing to put right than it looks, and worth sorting before anybody makes good the wall it has been arguing with.