Crack repair and finishing on a contemporary villa
Treatment of cracks, joints and junctions in a house of straight lines, where any wall defect shows from across the room.
In a white house of straight lines there is nowhere to hide a defect. The walls are large continuous surfaces, the low Algarve light crosses them in late afternoon, and any undulation, badly closed joint or crack is obvious from several metres away.
The work meant going through the whole house marking what needed attention: shrinkage cracks at the joints between different substrates, junctions at the openings, plasterboard corners, and the points where built-in elements meet the wall. Every crack was opened, cleaned, reinforced with tape and closed with a flexible filler — closing over the top without opening it gives you the crack back the following winter.
At the pocket sliding doors and the full-height openings the care was different: these are points where the structure moves and where the crack tends to reappear in exactly the same place. After filling came sanding, priming and the finishing coats, with the surface checked in raking light before it was called done.