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Q. The original inside painting of our home was done eight years ago when it was built and before we purchased it. A vertical cracking of the paint appeared several years ago along one wall of an outside corner in our family room. It almost looks like tape is pulling away an inch or so from the point where the two walls meet. My husband used something to repair the cracking of the paint and repainted. The crack in the paint appeared again.
Six months ago we had the room painted by a professional painter who again repaired the area. The crack in the paint is back. There are two other places in the same room where it seems that along an outside corner, tape has popped up-- no cracks in the paint but just the joint tape has popped up. These spots are two to three inches long where the cracked paint line is the whole length of the wall. Inside corners seem to be okay, it's just these outside corners. What can be done to fix this?
A. When your house was built the drywall contractor installed metal cornerbead to cover the raw drywall edges at all outside corners that formed inside the house at wall and bulkhead outside corners. The cornerbead makes for a smooth and durable corner. It has a little rounded outside corner that is very straight and perforations in it for about an inch and a quarter in both directions from the corner to act as an attachment flange and to hold the drywall compound that finishers apply and smooth back against the drywall face to make a nice clean corner.
What happened is that the installers placed the cornerbead up tight to the top and then nailed it into place during construction. As your house came into equilibrium with its environment over time, the wall framing lumber dried out to the state that it is today which is about a ten percent drier moisture content by weight than it was when the house was built. This loss of moisture from the framing lumber translates to a slight dimension change. Regular wood floor joists between floors routinely loose about a quarter inch across their faces and that causes that drywall bulge you see halfway up the stairs inside and sometimes bulges in the siding outside between the floors at the floor level.
The metal cornerbead can’t change dimension and, since it was jammed into position and nailed fast when the wood was moist, it is now warping slightly and pulling away from the wood causing the unsightly cracks and buckles you are now wrestling with.
In my experience once the wood has finished drying out the cracking, buckling and splitting stops and doesn’t get any worse. It doesn’t get any better either-- so if you don’t like it you have to do something about it. My opinion is that what repairs were done weren’t enough and after the paint and drywall patching compound dried the poor patches failed.
The way to take the bull by the horns is to remove and replace the offending cornerbead. To do the job right you’ll have to remove the baseboard trim along the floor (and any crown molding at the top if you have it) so that you can get the whole length of the outside corner off. Sand off a good bit of the remaining drywall compound where the edge of the cornerbead was and the finishers feathered out onto the wall.
Then buy vinyl cornerbead-- not metal. Install, finish, sand, paint and your done. Vinyl cornerbead is easy to work with and is somewhat forgiving so you should never have that problem again. Why don’t builders use it over metal? Cost. And they’re long gone by the time the problems show up. Any custom builder should consider it and I’ll bet most use it because the vinyl suppliers have lines of bullnose corners and other really nice finishing touches that add a lot of appeal at little or no extra labor. Check it out and I’ll bet you chose one of the custom items.