Drywall and ceiling repair in San Bruno

San Bruno wall cracks, taped and textured to match

The San Andreas Fault runs through western San Bruno roughly along Skyline Boulevard, and the eastern neighborhoods built on filled marshland may see liquefaction damage in an earthquake. Every house moves some, with quakes, soil and the seasons, and drywall shows it first: diagonal cracks off door and window corners, seams that open, nail pops. Filling a crack without reinforcing it usually brings the line back.

Send a photo of the crack with a coin or tape measure beside it, and tell us if it has grown. A crack that keeps widening needs a structural look before any patch. The rest we cut back, tape with mesh or paper, feather wide and texture to match. Compound dries between coats, so most patches take two or three short visits.

Worth knowing about San Bruno

• As of the 2009 General Plan, about 3,000 San Bruno homes had benefited from aircraft noise insulation, funded since 1983 for homes inside SFO's 65 CNEL contour.
• About 80.4% of San Bruno's 16,433 housing units were built before 1980, and 29.3% went up in the 1950s alone.
• The older eastern half, east of I-280, is flat, with a street grid from its early 20th century roots; the newer western half is mostly single-family subdivisions on curving hillside streets.