House Stucco Cracks (Santa Clara: contractor, drywall, assess)

[LawrenceZhu]

Hi everyone.
I just bought a flip house in Santa Clara back in May.
The house was built in 1950s, but was flipped a year ago.
We are seeing cracks recently inside the house, not sure how serious it is.
Any idea?

[LawrenceZhu]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7d...KUW1ON05z/view

[DMenscha]

It ought not to be too serious, but a competent contractor can have a look in the attic space to see what's going on.

It doesn't look like stucco to me, it looks like sheetrock.

[jk88cal]

That is inside the house, so it should sheetrock (doesn't look like plaster), as other poster mentioned. Most likely it's cosmetic and not structural.

If your house was newly drywalled, you might try to fix it and see if crack returns next year. If it is old house, and cracks develop over years, my take is don't bother repairing drywall cracks, because it will likely crack again.

I read online that if you use elastic compound and caulking, instead of putty, these can prevent future cracks. You do have to paint it and texture it, otherwise it will stand out.

If you want to do it right, you can hire a licensed contractor to come out to assess the situation and give you quote. The difficult part is 9 out of 10 contractor won't even respond to yourrequest, because job is so small that it is not worth their time and effort. Good luck with that.

[phantompilot]

Probably the flipper used green lumber when they replaced the ceiling joists or the wall studs and as the wood dries it shrinks and contracts and pulls the sheetrock panels apart from each other. You can tell these are separating on a seam...which tells me that's what it is.

Give it a year then repair and you should be fine. Just hire a couple drywaller/painters to retape/mud/texture....don't bother with a licensed contractor and all his overhead.