Photograph the cracks before you fill anything, because filler destroys the only evidence you have. Then work through them in order: anything sagging or drummy gets refixed or cut out, the junction where the ceiling meets the cornice gets a flexible sealant rather than hard filler, and only the fine cracks in the field of the sheet get raked out, taped and stopped.
Almost everything people find after a shake in Wellington belongs in that last group. The point of sorting them first is that the ones that do not belong there are the ones that matter.
What should you do before touching it?
Take photographs with a tape measure or a coin in the frame for scale, from a distance and up close, and make sure the date is on the file. Then lodge with your private insurer. Most insurers assess and manage the NHCover claim on the Commission’s behalf, so you make one call rather than two.
Two dates matter. You have a maximum of two years to lodge a claim, but the Natural Hazards Commission encourages you to claim within three months of the event, because a long gap makes damage much harder to attribute to a particular event. On the money side, NHCover for a residential building is capped at $300,000 plus GST, and any cover over that amount is provided by your private insurance policy.
There is a quieter version of this advice worth acting on today: photograph your ceilings while they are fine. Hairline cracking accumulates in every Wellington house over the years, so a crack on its own proves nothing about any particular event. A dated photograph of the same ceiling six months earlier proves what changed.
Which ceiling cracks are only cosmetic?
- A fine straight line following a sheet joint, wall to wall
- A hairline gap at the ceiling and cornice junction that has not opened up
- A short crack radiating from a light fitting, a downlight or a ceiling hatch
These are movement finding the weakest line in the surface, which is exactly what you would expect. Repaired properly, they stay shut.
Which ones mean something came loose?
- A visible sag or dip, most obvious when you look along the ceiling from a low angle rather than up at it
- A drummy note when you tap, meaning the lining has separated from the battens, or in an older house that the plaster has released from the lath
- Nail pops, showing as small round bulges or flaking discs of paint over each fixing
- A gap between ceiling and wall that has opened wide enough to see into
- Stepped cracking across several sheets, or a crack whose two edges no longer sit level with each other
- Grit, dust or fragments falling out of a crack
- A crack that reopens after every aftershock despite being repaired properly
Any of those means someone needs to look into the ceiling space before filler goes anywhere near it. Filling a ceiling that is hanging off its fixings makes it heavier and no safer.
What has to happen before each type gets painted?
| What you see | What it usually means | What must happen before paint |
|---|---|---|
| Hairline line following a sheet joint | The taped joint has released | Rake out, re-tape with paper tape, stop, sand, seal |
| Hairline gap at cornice or scotia | Ceiling and wall moved independently | Flexible sealant tooled neatly, never hard filler |
| Nail pops over fixings | Fixings have worked loose from the batten | Refix alongside with screws, deal with the popped fixing, then stop |
| Drummy patch when tapped | Lining or plaster has separated from the framing | Refix, or cut out and replace, before any surface work |
| Visible sag or dip | Fixings or battens have failed | Inspect from above and repair structurally first |
| Stepped cracking across several sheets | Movement in the frame, not the surface | Get it assessed. Do not fill it yet |
| Grit or dust falling from a crack | Material is loose above the lining | Stay out from under it and investigate |
Why does the cornice line always crack?
Because the ceiling and the wall are separate planes on separate framing, and they move relative to each other every time the building flexes. A rigid filler in that junction is being asked to do the one thing it cannot do, which is stretch.
The correct detail is a flexible sealant, tooled to a neat line and painted over. It moves without splitting. If someone has forced filler into that gap three times and it has cracked three times, that is the whole explanation.
Do nail pops matter, or can I just fill them?
They matter. A popped fixing tells you the sheet has moved relative to the batten behind it, and filling the dimple leaves the loose fixing sitting there ready to do it again in a year. The repair is to add a fixing close by into solid timber, deal with the offender, and then stop over both.
On a ceiling that has popped in a dozen places, refix the field of the sheet properly rather than treating each pop as a separate cosmetic job. Otherwise you are repainting the same ceiling in two summers.
Can you repair one patch and paint just that patch?
No, and this is where most do-it-yourself ceiling repairs come unstuck. Ceilings take light at a shallow angle from windows, which is the harshest lighting there is for showing a repair, and fresh stopping compound is far more porous than a ten-year-old painted ceiling, so an unsealed patch flashes to a different sheen.
Seal every repair, then coat the whole ceiling wall to wall in one session, keeping a wet edge the entire way. A ceiling coated in two sessions with a join across the middle shows the join. This is the single biggest difference between a repair that disappears and one you notice every time you lie on the couch. Where the stopping work is done well and the sealing is skipped, you still end up with a visible patch.
What if the ceiling is textured?
Stop. Textured ceiling coatings in older New Zealand homes can contain asbestos, and sanding, scraping or water-blasting one is the worst possible way to find out. Have a sample tested before anyone touches it.
If the test is positive, the usual answer is to over-line the ceiling rather than remove the texture, and removal work is for someone licensed to do it. Given the age of a lot of Wellington housing stock, this is a routine question here rather than an unusual one.
How long should you wait before repairing?
Long enough for the claim to be lodged and, if there is an active aftershock sequence, long enough that you are not repairing the same crack twice. There is no rule about it, but there is a sensible order: photograph, lodge, let the assessor see it, then repair.
Repairing early does not usually void anything, but it does mean the assessor is looking at your photographs instead of the damage, and that is a weaker position to argue from. The one exception is anything unsafe. If material is loose above a bed or a stairwell, deal with the safety issue first and document it as you go.
If you want someone to look at a ceiling and tell you honestly which category your cracks fall into before you commit to anything, or you have a scope of works ready to price alongside the interior painting, get in touch.
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