Drywall and plaster repair in Southeast Portland.

Southeast covers a lot of ground, and its houses vary widely. A call could come from a Sellwood-Moreland foursquare, a Richmond bungalow off Division, an apartment above a Belmont storefront, a house on Mount Tabor, or a Woodstock bungalow near Johnson Creek. Those houses were built in different years, finished in different ways, and have aged differently, so the fix that works in one is often the wrong fix for the next.

What most of them share is the kind of wall behind the paint. The core of Southeast, the old streetcar neighborhoods around Hawthorne, Belmont, Division, and Clinton, was built mostly between the 1890s and the 1930s, as the streetcar lines went in. Those houses have lath-and-plaster walls and hand-troweled ceilings from before spray equipment existed. Farther out, toward Woodstock, Lents, and the edges of Southeast, you find later homes with drywall and sprayed texture. Anyone working in Southeast has to handle both. Plaster and drywall are repaired differently, and a plaster wall patched the way you would patch drywall never sits quite right.

• Plaster repair in SE bungalows: cracks, loose plaster, and skim-coating in the pre-war homes that fill inner Southeast.
• Drywall repair for holes, cracks, dents, and nail pops in SE homes of every age.
• Ceiling repair for cracked or sagging ceilings and the water stains an old roof leaves behind.
• Texture matching so a repair blends into the finish the room already has, whether it is hand-troweled or sprayed.

Older homes in Southeast move with the seasons. Wet winters and dry summers change the moisture in the soil under the house, an old house settles, and plaster that is a hundred years old moves with it. That is why the same hairline crack shows up over the same door every winter. Most of these cracks are cosmetic and normal for a house this old. The ones to watch get wider over time or run in a stair-step pattern, especially near a corner or an opening like a door or window. We look at the crack before we fill it. If it points to something structural, we tell you and send you to the right person first, because painting over that kind of crack hides the problem without fixing it.

There is no shop counter or walk-in office in Southeast Portland, so we come to your home. Send photos of the damage along with your ZIP code. In most cases a written estimate and timeline reach you within one business day. Most drywall repair in Southeast Portland can be priced from photos with no site visit. Plaster in an older home is different, and sometimes we need to look at it in person. If so, we will say that up front.

Our Oregon CCB license is CCB# 263361, and The Drywall Repair Co. is bonded and insured. A written workmanship warranty backs every repair. You can look through our SE gallery before you decide.