wilkes

I suspect the crack will be back after a season or two.

Good job, the Latex paint was the best choice.The original finish of the drywall was substandard.

I would have, too, except that these cracks covered large parts of the wall, from floor to ceiling

I'd hang a picture over it then have a beer.

I've been working on this every night for about a month. It's been a constant pain in my neck... I cut out the bad area and scraped it down to the bare wall, tape it, mud it, prime it... and another area cracks. So I start over in a different place.

https://www.gowilkes...4802_0.jpg

Then yesterday I came across a small can of Valspar exterior latex primer that I bought several years ago. I figure, what the heck, give it a shot, right? So I tried painting over a particularly bad area using the latex primer instead of the water-based Kilz primer. An hour later... the wall looks perfect!

I'm kinda ill that I've been working on it for over a month when something I had in my garage would have fixed it all along But I'm also relieved that I finally have a solution

This sounds drastic, however, it seems to work best for stubborn cracks.

Use a pencil and mark a line a little over an inch on each side of the crack. Between the two lines should be enough room for your drywall tape.

Take a sharp utility knife and cut along each line at a 45-degree angle pointing down towards the crack. You want the cut to be roughly 1/8th of an inch deep.

Peel off the drywall paper between the crack and line you cut.

You should find loose pieces of drywall. Removed any loose pieces, they were causing the original crack to return after you fixed it.

Using DAP joint compound (not the cheap stuff) fill in any voids and leave a thin coating over the work area.

Apply paper joint tape.

Apply another thin layer of DAP joint compound over the tape. Then wait for it to dry.

If any air bubbles form under the paper tape, cut them out and use DAP joint compound to make the finish coat over the work area.

Wait for it to dry, sand, clean and paint the work area.

It sounds like you did everything right. Has the crack gotten noticeably bigger? You could have a foundation problem.

I'm hoping one of you wise people can help me.

I'm refinishing a room. It was originally painted a dark color and had several cracks and gaps, so I used joint compound to fill in the holes, and used fiber tape to cover cracks and then compounded on top of that.

After several mudding and sanding sessions to get it all smooth and nice, I finally was able to prime over everything last night. I'm using Killz primer.

Then today I did a second coat of primer. It had dried for about 24 hours between the first and second coat.

After about 4 hours I was going to paint, and looked over everything one last time. But I found several places that looked like the primer had crackled! I mean, areas that were several feet long and several feet wide.

I used a scraper and just barely rubbed over it, and the whole thing just flaked off. Dried mud, primer, everything, all the way down to the original paint color.

It did this in a places where I had fiber tape, too, so my original thought that the paint underneath was too smooth doesn't really work.

I scraped all of the weak areas down, then applied a thin layer of mud, in the hopes of priming over it again tomorrow.

But before I do, can of you with painting and refinishing experience give me an idea of what else I might need to do before priming?