Hello,

In my kitchen, there is a crack on the wall that was there when we
bought the house 18 months ago. When doing the walk-through before making
an offer, I noticed this and checked it out. A poor spackle job had been
done on
it to get the house ready to sell, but it was obvious that the crack had
reopened after being patched.
The crack is on the wall just below the ceiling, where the ceiling opens
up from a normal 9' ceiling in
the kitchen into the vaulted (2-story open) ceiling in the dining room. It
extends from the ceiling down behind one of the kitchen cabinets. I don't
know how long the whole crack is, as it does not emerge from behind the
cabinet anywhere.
There wasn't any problem with the foundation or framing that I could see
in the unfinished basement, and the home inspector said it seemed like
normal settling at this stress point on the fairly new house (built 2000).
Seemed a simple enough job to patch it up, but I watched it for 12 months to
see if it got worse before I tackled it. If it were settling, I thought, it
would get worse in that time and I would end up having to fix it again, or
be a red flag for something much worse than drywall.
In March, I hadn't noticed that the crack was any worse, so I scraped
out all of the spackle to see what I was up against. The crack is right at
the joint of two sheets of drywall, and with the joint compound removed, it
was almost 1/4" wide, and a perfect vertical line that follows the joint.
So, the drywall wasn't cracked at all, it was just a gap between the sheets.
I didn't see any joint tape at all, but maybe it was there originally and
the previous homeowner cut it out when patching it up.
One of the sheets (on the vaulted ceiling side of the joint) is anchored
to the stud. The other sheet was not. I put in 2 or 3 drywall screws to
snug it down, and patched up the joint but did not paint it, figuring I
would let it sit a few more months to see if the fix would be permenant or
if it would reappear.
This week, I climbed up there again to check it out. Now it looks like
the crack is reappearing slightly, but instead of a crack forming because
the two sides are separating, the spackle is bulging up just enough to be
loosened and fall out if rubbed across with a finger.
My questions a
1. Is the spackle bulging now only because I did a ****-poor job, or
maybe because the sheets are actually moving together now? (Perhaps because
of hot summer temperatures?)
2. Was my fix adequate? Should I have put joint tape on, or something
more drastic?
3. What would you do now? (Short of unloading the house-- the wife is
attached now.)

Any thoughts or comments would be most welcome.

-Travis