Drywall Repair in Monument, CO

The Line That Comes Back Every Winter

A gap has opened along the top of a wall in your house, where the ceiling meets it, and you first noticed it in January. There is a good chance you have spent a while worrying about your foundation since. The reassuring version is the likely one, and Colorado Springs Expert Drywall would rather you heard it before you paid anybody. That line is a well-known thing that happens to newer houses in cold places. Drywall repair in Monument, CO deals with it constantly.

Monument is high. The town sits at just under 7,000 feet on the Palmer Divide, and Monument Hill is higher still. It gets around 110 inches of snow in an average year, far more than the city below it. The building department also sets a heavier ground snow load at and above 7,000 feet than below, and Monument straddles that line.

The housing is also the newest of any town we cover. The median Monument home was built in 2006, and more than three quarters of the stock has gone up since 2000. New houses, cold winters, long heating seasons. That combination has a signature.

What truss uplift actually is

Your roof is carried on trusses, and the wood in the top of a truss lives in a different climate from the wood in the bottom of it.

Through a Monument winter the attic is cold and the ceiling below is warm. The upper part of the truss takes on and gives up moisture at a different rate from the lower part, so it bows very slightly upward. That lifts the middle of your ceiling with it. Where the ceiling meets an interior wall the two part company, and a gap opens along the joint.

Then spring arrives, the attic warms, and it closes again.

That is why filling it in February does not hold. Your ceiling comes back down in June and pushes the filler out, and you get to look at a worse line than the one you started with. It is also why this is not a foundation problem: nothing at the bottom of your house has moved at all.

Which lines are worth a second look

Not everything overhead is seasonal, and the honest answer is that a few things do want attention:

• A gap that appears in winter and closes in summer, which is the classic and is usually cosmetic
• A crack that has widened across two or more seasons without ever closing
• A ceiling that sags rather than cracks, which is a different problem entirely
• Any line accompanied by doors in the same room starting to catch
• A stain rather than a line, since color means water and water means the source first
• A repair that was made and came back in the same place within a year

The first one is the common one up here by a distance. The fix for it is a technique rather than a material. The joint gets treated so your ceiling is free to move against the wall instead of being glued to it, and the line stops reappearing rather than being refilled every spring.

And the thing under the house, which is genuinely different up here

Worth saying because the advice for Monument is not the advice for the south end of the county. The ground under this part of El Paso County is sandy rather than the heavy clay you get down toward Fountain. So the wall problems that come with heavy clay are not the ones we usually find up here.

That does not mean nothing moves. If you have a finished basement, those walls were still built to hang from the framing with a gap left underneath. The baseboard down there should be fastened only to the wall, never down into the slab. Go and check yours. It is the cheapest thing on this page to look at.