Questions homeowners ask

A visit for a handful of small holes starts around $165. A single hole up to a foot across runs roughly $210 to $400 with texture and primer. A ceiling section replaced after a leak is roughly $500 to $1,600. Plaster work and anything at height sits higher. Full ballpark list is on the what it costs page, and figures are estimates rather than an offer.

Small repairs are priced from photographs at no cost, usually the same day. Water damage, plaster and ceiling work get looked at in person first, also at no cost, because those cannot be judged accurately from a picture.

Almost certainly ice damming rather than plumbing, particularly if the stain is near an outside wall. Snow melts on a warm roof, refreezes at the cold eave, and the backed-up water gets under the shingles. The ceiling is the symptom; the cure is in the attic.

If the board is firm again, no — a stain-blocking primer and fresh paint will hold, because the tannins in that mark bleed through ordinary paint but not through a sealer. If the board gives under a thumb, bows, or has gone chalky at the edge, primer only buys you a season and the section should come out with any soaked insulation above it.

Knock on it. Plaster sounds hard and dead, drywall sounds hollow between the studs. A pin pushes into drywall easily and stops against plaster. There is a longer guide on the plaster or drywall page.

Usually, yes. It is harder, quieter and more fire-resistant than modern board, and where it has simply come loose from the lath it can be mechanically re-secured for less than a tear-out costs. Where it has crumbled to powder or the lath has failed, board is the sensible replacement.

If the texture went up before the early eighties, yes. There is no way to identify it by eye, the test is inexpensive, and results come back in a few days. Nothing gets scraped here on an assumption.

Yes, and for ceiling damage we would rather. Wet material left in a ceiling until spring keeps insulation flattened and gives mould somewhere to work. The job we turn down is sealing a ceiling while ice is still building on the roof above it.

A few small holes is a single visit. Anything larger involves compound that has to dry between passes, so a typical room is two or three short visits across about a week. Setting compounds can compress that when a schedule demands it.

Every repair is primed as standard. Painting is quoted separately because plenty of homeowners prefer to do their own, and because a wall that has faded for fifteen years will never accept a dab of the original colour — the new coat has to run the full width of the surface to disappear.

Yes. Sprayed textures are matched with a hopper and test passes until the pattern reads the same, then blended past the repair. Older sand-float and swirl finishes are worked by hand until the surface matches the wall beside it.

Yes, and they are batched by neighbourhood so a single hole in the North End is not waiting for a large project to justify the trip. A list of small repairs in one visit is far better value than calling about each one.

We photograph damage, opened cavities and finished work as a matter of course, and estimates are itemised by room and surface, which is what an adjuster wants to see. We repair walls; we do not negotiate claims on your behalf.

Ceiling repairs while the ice damming that caused them is unaddressed. Cosmetic crack repair where the crack is structural. Finishing a basement that still takes water in a wet spring. In each case the drywall is the cheap part of the problem and the money belongs somewhere else first.

Manchester and the towns around it — Bedford, Goffstown, Hooksett, Auburn, Londonderry, Derry, Litchfield, Merrimack, Bow, Candia, and as far as Concord and Nashua. Roughly half an hour from the city in any direction.