Drywall Repair in Security-Widefield, CO

A Town Built All At Once, and What That Means Now

Your house probably has a birthday within about eighteen months of every other house on your street, and here is why. In 1953 a man named Edwin W. Hayes bought a ranch south of Colorado Springs and formed a company to build houses on it. The first model homes at Security Village opened in January 1955, on eight hundred acres, and the builder was putting up seven houses a week. Widefield came next door in 1957. The school district went from 125 students in 1954 to over 3,500 by 1961. Colorado Springs Expert Drywall works on those houses constantly, and their history is the reason drywall repair in Security-Widefield is a slightly different job from anywhere else in the county.

Sixteen percent of the housing here was built in the 1950s. That is around seven times the share of any other town on our list. Almost nothing predates 1950. Nearly ninety percent is owner occupied and virtually all of it is single family detached. District 3 grew around it at the same pace.

So this is not a neighborhood that grew. It is a neighborhood that was manufactured, quickly, to a handful of plans, and then lived in.

Why a single cohort matters to your walls

Houses built together age together, and that is the useful thing here.

When a whole street goes up in the same eighteen months, from the same floor plan, by the same crews, using the same materials, it does not just look similar. A single cohort that uniform fails the same way too. The board came off the same trucks. The joints were taped by the same hands. And it has all now had exactly the same seventy years of Colorado seasons.

Which means the crack over your dining room door is very likely in the same place as the one over your neighbor's, and it is there for the same reason. That is genuinely good news. We have usually seen your house before, in the sense that we have been inside four of them. A job on a familiar plan gets read faster, and quoted more tightly, than one nobody can predict.

The ground under it, which never signed up for any of this

The other half of the story is what Security Village was built on.

This is the south end of the county, where the ground is clay that swells when it takes on water and shrinks back when it dries. Your footings ride on it. Move a foundation a quarter inch and the walls above it open at their weakest point. That is nearly always a door corner, a window corner, or the line where a wall meets the ceiling.

Seventy years of that is a lot of seasons. Which is why the cracks here are usually not new, and why the question worth answering is not what caused it but whether it is still moving. Three things we look at on a house of this vintage:

• Whether the line has changed width since you noticed it, which is the whole question
• Whether the same crack has been filled before, and how many times
• Whether the wall is original board or a later repair sitting on top of one
• Whether the doors in that room have started catching at the same time
• What is directly above it, since an upstairs wall and a ceiling line are different stories
• Whether anything outside changed recently: drainage, a downspout, a big tree removed

The wall material itself, which surprises people

Houses from this era do not all have the drywall you would expect. Some carry early gypsum board, thinner than modern sheet, and some carry original plaster board. A seventy-year-old wall behaves differently under a knife and it takes a repair differently.

It is also worth saying plainly that none of that is a problem. It is simply a thing worth knowing before somebody cuts into it, and it is one of the reasons a quote for your house should come from somebody who has stood in it.