Cracked Drywall and Sticking Doors in DFW: Soil Movement, or Something You Should Fix First

A crack appears over the door casing in August. By March it has closed up to a hairline. The homeowner calls a foundation company, gets a free inspection, and gets a number with a lot of zeros in it. Sometimes that number is honest. Sometimes the house was only doing what every house on that street does.

We do drywall and remodel work across Fort Worth, Arlington, and Dallas. We see these cracks constantly. Here is how we read them before we quote anything.

Why North Texas houses move on a schedule

Much of the Metroplex sits on highly expansive clay. Those clay minerals take on water and swell, then give it up in drought and shrink. The soil under your slab is not a static thing. It is a sponge on a seasonal cycle, and the cycle in North Texas is severe because our summers are hot and dry and our springs are wet.

What that produces is seasonal slab movement. Perimeter soil dries out fastest, so the edges drop in late summer while the center, shaded and insulated by the house, holds moisture. After the fall and spring rains the edges swell back. Interior finishes are rigid. Soil is not. Something has to give, and the thing that gives is drywall at its weakest points.

Cosmetic and seasonal, or a real problem

Nobody can diagnose a foundation from a photo, including us. But there are patterns that lower the concern and patterns that raise it.

Usually cosmetic

• Hairline cracks running straight up from the top corner of a door or window opening. That is the weakest point in any drywall plane and it cracks first under even small movement.
• Cracks that follow a drywall seam or a nail line. That is a taping or fastening issue showing itself, not the ground.
• Nail pops in a ceiling. Usually framing shrinkage and truss movement.
• Width that stays under about the thickness of a dime and changes with the season.

Get it looked at

• Cracks wider than a quarter inch, or that widen steadily month over month and never close back up.
• Diagonal cracks that run a long way through a wall, especially several of them all leaning the same direction. Direction points at where the movement is coming from.
• Interior doors that will not latch, or that swing open on their own, with a visibly tapered gap at the head. That is the opening out of square, not a hinge problem.
• Stair-step cracking in exterior brick, brick separating from the window frames, or a gap opening between the brick and the slab.
• Gaps where interior trim meets the wall, or cabinet runs pulling off the wall at one end.
• Any of it paired with new plumbing symptoms: a slow drain, a hot spot in the floor, a water bill that climbed for no reason. A leaking supply or sewer line under a slab wets clay locally and will move a house all by itself.

Call an engineer before you call a foundation contractor

This is the single piece of advice in this post most likely to save you money. A licensed professional engineer who does residential foundation evaluations will take elevation readings across the floor, look at the site, and write you a letter that says what is happening and what, if anything, needs to be done. You pay for that letter. That is the point. The engineer has no pier to sell you.

A free inspection from a repair company is a sales call. It may be an honest one. But the person measuring is also the person who gets paid if the answer is yes. Engineers in Texas are licensed and regulated by the Texas Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors, and you can verify a license there before you hire anyone.

If the engineer says the movement is within normal seasonal range and no repair is warranted, you just bought certainty for a fraction of a pier job. If the engineer says repair, you now have a scope written by someone independent, and you can bid it to three contractors on identical terms instead of comparing three different stories.

What you can control: water

Expansive clay responds to moisture, so moisture is the lever. The goal is not wet soil or dry soil. The goal is soil that stays about the same all year.

• Water the perimeter, consistently, especially in a dry summer. A soaker hose set back a foot or so from the slab edge, run on a schedule, beats a heavy soak once a month. Sudden re-wetting of badly dried clay is its own kind of movement.
• Grade away from the house. Soil should fall away from the slab, not pond against it. A flowerbed that holds water at the foundation on one side and bakes dry on the other is a recipe for differential movement.
• Get gutters and downspouts discharging well away from the slab, not dumping at a corner.
• Watch the trees. Large trees pull serious volumes of water out of clay in summer. A mature tree close to the slab can dry that side of the house hard. That does not automatically mean remove it, but an engineer should know it is there.
• Fix plumbing leaks first. Always. No foundation work and no drywall repair should happen with an unresolved leak under the slab.

What we will and will not do

We are a remodeling and drywall contractor. We are not a foundation repair company and we are not engineers. So our rule is simple.

What we will do is the finish work, done in the right order, once the cause is settled. That includes cracks an engineer has called cosmetic, which is most of them.

The correct sequence

1. 01Diagnose. Engineer's evaluation if the symptoms warrant it. Plumbing test if there is any sign of a leak.
2. 02Stabilize. Any recommended foundation work, drainage correction, and a consistent watering routine established.
3. 03Wait if you can. A season through a wet-to-dry swing tells you whether the movement has actually stopped. Repairs made after that swing stay closed.
4. 04Repair the drywall properly.
5. 05Prime and paint last, wall to wall, so the repair does not read as a lighter rectangle in the middle of an older finish.

What real drywall repair involves

A crack repair that does not telegraph back through the paint is not a smear of compound. The reason most patches fail visibly is that the repair was thinner and narrower than the stress it had to carry.

• Cut the crack out. Rake it open into sound board rather than filling a hairline that is still under tension.
• Reinforce it. Tape over the joint, paper or mesh depending on the location, so the compound is not the only thing holding the line.
• Refasten the area if the board is loose from the framing. Screws near the crack, dimpled, not broken through the paper.
• Build it out wide. Three coats, each one wider than the last, feathered a foot or more past the joint on a flat wall. Narrow is what makes a patch visible.
• Sand to the surrounding finish level, then match the texture. In DFW that is usually orange peel or a knockdown, and matching the spray pattern and knockdown timing is most of the job.
• Prime the patch before paint. Bare compound absorbs differently than the wall around it and will flash through a single topcoat.

If you want the detail on how finish levels are specified and why a level 4 wall and a level 5 wall look different under a window, we wrote that up separately. It is the same standard we hold a repair to.

Drywall Installation and repair is on our published scope list, alongside interior painting, kitchen and bath remodels, and full multi-room renovations. Serving all of DFW.

Phone

(817) 681-1020

Service area

Fort Worth, Arlington, Dallas, wider DFW Metroplex

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