Joint Compound is the Handyman's Other Secret Weapon

Once upon a time there was a crack in our living room wall.  It was just a little crack.   We didn't pay much attention to it.  We assumed the building had just settled at some point and the previous owners just did a poor job of patching the crack.

When we painted the living room, we patched the crack ourselves and thought it was over.  But no, that crack would never EVER really go away.  Over the years that crack reappeared numerous times and eventually reproduced, so that a 18 inch-wide expanse of our wall from floor to ceiling was a series of interlaced cracks.  The cracks also appeared in a similar pattern on the adjacent wall in the kitchen.  The paint started flaking away and both sides of our wall was looking pretty horrible.  We had no idea what was causing it.

This is the "crack" in the kitchen

And here is the "crack" in the living room

We had a few possible explanations: 1) the dryer (which was on one of the damaged walls) was shaking the crap out of the wall and making it crack and lose paint, 2) the enormous cottonwood tree outside had somehow burrowed its roots under our building and was pushing up on the foundation, causing the cracks, 3) aliens, 4) some other thing we hadn't thought of.

After much hand-wringing and fretting, I decided that I had had enough of that ugly, flaky wall.  I put on my tough lady hat--which I also wore when I fixed our digital piano--and decided to figure out what was causing it and fix the darn thing once and for all.  I called upon all the powers of physics, math, architecture, sudoku and a little divination to solve the problem.  Actually, what happened was that I put my hand on the wall while the dryer was running one day.  The wall was unusually hot.  It turned out that it was the dryer after all, but not in the way we thought.  At some point in the history of our condo, the dryer duct had come apart inside the wall/floor and the dryer was venting into the wall instead of though the duct to the outside.  Casey confirmed this by sticking his arm in the wall and taking a few photos.

  (That would be the disconnected dryer duct choked with lint)

(This is the duct under the floor also disconnected and choked with eons of lint.  Good news though.....lots of insulation!)

Casey's parents quickly came to the rescue, bringing their van and arsenal of tools with them.  Casey's dad has a background in construction so we knew we were in safe hands.  He taught us how to fix the cracks in the wall with a putty knife, joint compound, a wet rag and lots and lots of scraping. 

 Dad in-law assessing the problem

 

 After scraping off all the old flaky paint

Look at that handsome, handy husband of mine!

Then Casey and his dad attacked the problem of the dryer duct.  They created a trapdoor into the floor and reattached the pieces of the duct, securing it with......duct tape!  That's what duct tape is actually for!  I didn't know that!  I always thought it was for tricking out your car!

The trapdoor

All this happened with just a few casualties.  My in-laws' NEW van suffered a primer spill in the back and the blade of my dad in-law's jigsaw broke.  The primer was (mostly) cleaned up with our steamer vac (I guess it can be handy to have a kid who regularly pukes on the carpet).  The jigsaw though was a total loss.  Apparently the size or style of blades the saw needed were no longer made.  But the main thing is that nobody lost any fingers.  We also discovered stratification of our kitchen floor and found evidence of an earlier, groovier civilization.

By the end of the weekend, most of the work was done, but our kitchen was virtually unusable.  Having tools and supplies covering the counters and a major appliance blocking your sink and dishwasher will do that.  But somehow my mother in-law managed to wash dishes anyway.  I didn't see her do it, but I'm pretty sure she went to Hogwarts and is hiding it from us.

After my in-laws went back home, all that was left was to finish the walls.  When it came to re-texturing the wall, Casey's confidence wavered, so I did that part.  I had a pretty good time smearing and splatting (is that a word?) joint compound on the wall to match the original smears and splats.  Then we primed and repainted.  We discovered that our white kitchen was not exactly the same as the white paint we bought so we ended up painting the entire wall, and that required moving our fridge out of the way.

Look at that professional-looking splatting!

All done!  I should totally become a wall plastic surgeon!

 So, I guess the moral of this story is beware of little cracks.  They can be a huge pain to fix.  I think the worst part of this whole experience is that Casey and I don't really get to enjoy the fruits of our labors, since our condo is up for sale and we don't live there anymore.  Speaking of which......Anyone want to buy my newly spiffed-up condo?  You know you do.  Blog readers get a discount!