Drywall Repair in Manitou Springs, CO

Behind Your Paint, It Is Probably Not Drywall

Manitou Springs has the oldest housing stock in El Paso County and it is not close. Almost forty percent of the houses here were built in 1939 or earlier, and forty-five percent predate 1950. The median construction year is 1954. Nothing at all has been built since 2020. So when somebody calls Colorado Springs Expert Drywall about drywall repair in Manitou Springs, the first thing worth establishing is whether there is any drywall involved.

Often there is not. A wall from that era is usually plaster laid over wood lath. Thin strips are nailed across the studs with gaps between them, and the plaster is pushed through those gaps so it squeezes out behind and hardens into keys. Those keys are what hold your wall on. Modern board does nothing of the kind, and neither does anybody who treats the two the same way.

The town is also a National Register historic district, listed in 1983, and it is not a token designation. Roughly 750 of about a thousand buildings in it are contributing buildings, which covers very nearly the whole city, from the Ruxton canyon houses down to the pre-war cottages on the flat.

What actually goes wrong with a plaster wall

Plaster fails in ways drywall does not, and knowing which one you have changes the whole conversation.

The common one is not a crack at all. It is a section that has come loose. When the keys behind the lath break, usually from age or vibration or long-ago water, the plaster stops being attached and starts merely resting there. Older Victorian work is often reinforced with horsehair, which holds a cracked section together long after it has let go at the back. It can look perfect and sound hollow. Press it gently and it moves slightly against the lath, and that movement is the whole diagnosis.

The temptation at that point is to take the lot off and board the room in drywall. Sometimes that genuinely is the right answer. Very often it is not, because a plaster wall can be refastened to its lath and saved, which keeps a surface you cannot buy and costs less than a rebuild. On a contributing building in a listed district, it is also a decision worth taking slowly.

The ground here, which is its own case

Manitou sits right at the mountain front, and the beds underneath the town dip steeply rather than lying flat. That makes for restless ground even by Front Range standards, and a house that has been standing on it since 1905 has had a long time to respond.

Which is not a reason to worry about your house. It is a reason to find out what a given crack is before anybody fills it. A line that has been in the same place, at the same width, since your grandmother's day is part of the building. One that has opened in the last two seasons is a different conversation.

• Whether the wall is plaster over lath, plaster over board, or drywall
• Whether a section sounds hollow or moves when pressed
• Whether the crack follows the lath lines, which tells us a great deal
• Whether that wall has ever taken on water, and how long ago that was
• Whether the repair needs to match a hand-worked surface or a flat one
• What the access is like, since half of these houses are up steps from the street

Getting to the job, which matters more here than anywhere

Worth mentioning because it changes planning rather than price. A narrow lot, a tight street and a front door up a flight of stone steps is the normal case here rather than the awkward one. Full sheets of board do not turn easily in a hallway built in 1908.

None of it is a problem. It just means the work gets planned rather than improvised, and that a job here is quoted by somebody who has seen your steps.