The New Toothpaste Method for Dummies

Small crack in drywall

One bit of advice well-known to college students everywhere (and, apparently, everywhen) is the "toothpaste solution": when you move out of the dorm at the end of the year, use plain white toothpaste to fill any nail holes you've left in the walls. By our conservative estimate, older dorm rooms at some of the large colleges (we're thinking of Foster and McNutt quads at IU Bloomington, for instance) probably have better "dental health" than some of the students living there! Nowadays, of course, one of the biggest problems with this solution is finding white toothpaste... but we digress. Whatever the case, Crystal Ray (real name Kim Dalessandro, we think) of DailyTwoCents.com has the "real" solution for the problem: you use baking soda! No kidding: in her post "An Easy Way to Hide a Ceiling Crack,"¹ Crystal / Kim informs us that, if you have a crack in a drywall ceiling, 

"This easy way to hide a ceiling crack requires [just] baking soda, clear drying craft and a putty knife." 

We assume that by "clear drying craft" she's referring to craft glue; at least that's what she mentions later. Ray / Dalessandro's little how-to, she tells us, is supposed to fill in any "unsightly cracks" caused by "settling." We've all seen them, and the smart seller makes certain they've been "repaired" (by which we mean "covered up") before showing the house to prospective buyers. Crystal / Kim (a "former home decorator" tells us, in her most informative  way, that 

"To [repair] it the right way it takes filler, drywall tape, a putty knife, sandpaper and a lot of time..."

...which, if we're talking about settling cracks, is a vast overstatement. Nobody re-tapes drywall for a settling crack; that's like swatting a gnat with a cruise missile. On the other hand, no one does it this way, either:

"...combine enough glue and baking soda to make a thick paste. Push the mixture into the crack, and smooth it over with a putty knife of choice..."

Why don't professional painters and handypersons (as well as competent amateurs) do it Crystal's way? Several reasons, of which the top two are: That baking soda-glue mixture is going to dry in a rigid mass. Drywall cracks aren't just caused by settling, they're also caused by expansion and contraction of the house's exterior shell with seasonal temperature changes. In other words, if you fill the crack with something brittle, there's a good chance that it's eventually going to re-open. You smooth the patch on "with a putty knife"? Is Ray / Dalessandro kidding? That would only work if the ceiling (or wall) is smooth -- and that's rather unlikely, especially if you're talking about ceilings because they're almost always textured. Using a putty knife would scrape the texture from the ceiling along the length of the crack, making the repair quite obvious!

No, professionals use caulk - latex or silicone -- to fill minor cracks in drywalled surfaces. It's naturally adhesive, which allows it to bind to the margins of the crack. You apply it from a tube with a narrow tip, which lets you squeeze it into the crack instead of forcing it in with a putty knife. Once the caulk is in place, you can touch it up to match the texture of the surrounding surface. The white color matches many ceiling paints well enough to be unobtrusive, and caulk is paintable as well. Best of all, caulk remains flexible enough to stretch and squeeze with the nearly microscopic changes in the structure that caused the crack in the first place. Oh, and a tube of caulk will cost about the same as a bottle of craft glue, and you need one anyway to re-caulk around windows as part of your seasonal maintenance (you do perform seasonal maintenance, don't you?)

If you want a half-assed solution that will need to be repeated in a few months, follow Crystal / Kim's instructions. If you want to do what the pros do instead, buy some caulk. We strongly suggest you do the second, otherwise you'll also be a candidate for Dumbass of the Day.

NOTE: we're talking about small cracks here, the ones about a pencil-line wide that follow the edges of drywall sheets where a tape job has failed. If you find a crack that cuts across the wall or ceiling at an angle, zig-zags, wraps around a corner, is wider than about 1/8" or just plain looks "serious," it probably is serious. Caulk won't fix it, and there's a chance that repairing the drywall is just treating the symptom instead of the disease.

¹ The website is now defunct, and archive.org's Wayback machine never made a copy of the post. Oh, well, no loss...

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