Drywall Repair in Black Forest, CO

Newer Walls Than Almost Anywhere

Black Forest is unincorporated, zoned to a five-acre minimum since 1965, and classified entirely rural. It voted down incorporation in 2006. Houses sit well apart, under the pines, on their own wells. The median house here was built in 1996 and around 63 percent of the stock dates from 1990 or later, which already made this a young place by El Paso County standards. Colorado Springs Expert Drywall covers the whole of it, and drywall repair in Black Forest is shaped by how recently most of these walls went up.

Then June 2013 happened. The fire that came through destroyed 486 houses, took two lives, and was the most destructive in Colorado's history at the time. The first rebuilt house was occupied that December.

So a substantial part of this community's housing has been framed, boarded, taped and finished inside the last twelve years. That is a very unusual thing for a place to be able to say, and it matters to your walls.

What a young wall does, and what it does not

Newer construction moves for different reasons than old construction, and the reasons are gentler.

The framing in a newer house gives up moisture over its first couple of years and shrinks very slightly as it goes. The house beds down onto its foundation. Both are normal and both are finished within a few years. Both leave fine lines at the weakest points in a wall: door corners, window corners, and the joint where a wall meets the ceiling.

What we do not generally find in Black Forest is the heavy clay behavior that troubles the south end of the county. The ground under this part of El Paso County is sandier, and the wall problems that come with a swelling, shrinking clay are not the ones Black Forest houses usually have. That is worth saying plainly, because a contractor who arrives talking about expansive soil on a Black Forest lot is reciting a script rather than reading your house.

The finish is the part that needs real attention

This is where a rebuilt, custom-built community is genuinely different from a subdivision.

These are not a handful of repeated floor plans. Black Forest houses were built one at a time, by different builders, to different specifications, and the wall and ceiling finishes vary accordingly. Hand-applied textures sit next to sprayed ones. One house has a level 5 smooth wall in the great room and a knockdown in the bedrooms.

Which means a patch here cannot be matched from a photograph or from a guess about the era. It gets read off your actual wall, mixed to suit, and tested on a scrap board before anything goes near the repair. Things worth telling us when you call:

• Roughly when the house was built or rebuilt, if you know
• Whether the finish is smooth, sprayed, or applied by hand
• Whether the room has been repainted since the finish went on
• Whether the wall gets low sun across it at any point in the day
• Whether it is on a wall or a ceiling, since ceilings are far less forgiving
• Whether anything is planned for that room afterward, such as a repaint

Access, and why it is worth mentioning

Five-acre lots mean long driveways, and driveways up here are not all paved. Nothing about that is a problem, and it is not a surcharge. It simply gets planned rather than discovered, which is one more reason a real price comes from somebody who has driven up to your house rather than from somebody who has not.