Horizontal drywall crack and stuck door
Horizontal drywall cracks extending from door frames combined with doors that stick point to structural shifting or foundational movement. Ignoring these signs can lead to worsening damage that requires professional inspection and costly repairs.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- This comes up 35.6× more often in r/homeowners than across the site as a whole.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Scraping, sanding down, retaping, finishing, and painting the seamDid this help you?
- 2Attributing structural changes to humidity and weather conditionsDid this help you?
- 3Waiting to see if issues resolve on their ownDid this help you?
- 4consulting a structural engineer before contacting repair companiesDid this help you?
- 5using polyjacking to lift the slab if it is a good candidateDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I've noticed these cracks in a floor beam and a door above that's become tough to open.”source ↗
“i would get someone to look before it gets worse”source ↗
“My drywall on a small interior wall has a perfectly horizontal crack starting from an interior door frame (right side) to the wall of the front door (left side). Also the interior door on the right now gets stuck on closing.”source ↗
“I've had some sheetrock "stairstep" cracks in one corner of my house for about 10 years that have gotten worse and wider over the years and the two windows in that corner of that house have now shifted so that they're hard to shut.”source ↗