Interior Remodeling

It depends on what you are changing, not on what it costs. Paint, texture repair, trim, flooring and swapping a door into an existing opening are finish work and generally need no permit. Moving or removing a wall, adding or relocating circuits, moving a drain or vent, or altering ductwork generally does, and the licensed trades pull their own. The complication is that the office issuing that permit is not determined by your postal address, so the authority for your specific parcel gets confirmed in writing before the schedule is set. An HOA rarely reviews interiors, but in a townhouse or condominium regime a party wall or anything penetrating it may need architectural approval under Texas Property Code Chapter 209.

Because texture is a technique, not a product. Knockdown, orange peel, splatter, skip trowel and hand-troweled finishes each depend on mud thickness, air pressure, nozzle size, tip angle and how long the applicator waits before flattening it. Two people using identical materials produce visibly different walls. Add thirty years of paint build-up on the original and a fresh patch can still read differently under raking light even when the pattern is right. The fix is to spray sample boards, hold them against the wall in that room’s own daylight, and adjust until the sample disappears, then feather the new texture well past the repair. Where a match will not come, re-texturing the whole surface to a natural break line is the honest answer.

Testing is the only way to know, and it is cheap next to guessing wrong. Sprayed ceiling texture and older joint compound may contain asbestos, and stock already in circulation kept being used after the manufacturing restrictions of the 1970s, so ceilings installed into the early 1980s can still test positive. Nothing is hazardous while it sits undisturbed — scraping and sanding is what puts fibres in the air. Take a small sample to an accredited lab before any removal is scheduled. A positive result leaves three real options: licensed abatement, encapsulation with a bonding primer, or covering the ceiling with new board and finishing over it. A negative result makes wet-scraping straightforward.

Sheen matters more here than colour does. Flat and matte hide wall imperfections best, which is why they belong on ceilings and on long unlit hallway walls, but they hold dirt and cannot be scrubbed without burnishing a dull patch. Eggshell and satin are the working choice for kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms and anywhere children put their hands, because a damp cloth lifts marks without leaving a shine. Trim and doors want a satin or semi-gloss enamel: it is harder, it cleans, and it survives a mop hitting the baseboard. In genuinely wet rooms, ask for a mildew-resistant bathroom formulation rather than simply going up a sheen in a standard wall paint.

Texas does not license general contractors or remodelers. The Texas Residential Construction Commission, the closest thing the state ever had to a registry, was abolished on 1 September 2009 and was never replaced. Anyone offering you a state remodeler’s licence is describing something that does not exist. What is licensed is the individual trades: electricians, plumbers and HVAC technicians hold licences through the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, and that portion of the work should be done by a licence holder who pulls the permit. So the questions actually worth asking are: who performs the electrical and plumbing and under whose licence, is there a current certificate of insurance, and is the full scope in writing before any money changes hands.

Usually yes, if the work is confined to a room or two and you accept that those rooms are out of service. Drywall sanding is the deciding factor — it makes a fine dust that travels wherever air moves, so plastic barriers, zip doors, taped-off returns and filtered extraction are what make it liveable rather than good intentions. Bathrooms are the hard case: if it is the only one, plan to be elsewhere or arrange alternatives. Ceiling removal across an open-plan floor is also worth leaving for. Whatever the scope, the air conditioning stays running for curing, so shutting the house down and going away for a fortnight is not the saving it appears to be.

Because the crack is a symptom, not the defect. The clay under most of this region swells when it is wet and shrinks when it dries, so the slab and framing move with the seasons and the drywall tears at its weakest points: the corners of doors and windows, and the joint where the ceiling meets the wall. Compound and tape over a moving joint fail again, often within the same year. Two things help — evening out the moisture around the foundation so the movement is smaller, and repairing with mesh, setting compound and correct fastening instead of a smear of filler. If the crack is wide or stepped, and doors will not latch and floors slope, get a structural engineer before spending anything on finishes.

Start by establishing whether the wall carries anything, because that answer changes the whole job. A non-load-bearing partition comes out relatively simply, though you still have to deal with what runs inside it — wiring, a vent stack, a return-air path. A load-bearing wall needs a header sized by an engineer, temporary support while it goes in, and a permit with inspection. Then there is the finish problem people forget: the ceiling above the removed wall leaves a scar that has to be re-textured across its full width, and the floor underneath needs filling and blending. Budget for the patch, not just the demolition. It is worth doing when it fixes how you move through the house, not because a room looks larger in a photograph.