Carlsbad · North County San Diego · South Orange County
Flat walls.Straight corners.On schedule.
Dino’s Drywall has been hanging, taping and finishing across North County since 2014 — from a single patch in a hallway to a full commercial tenant improvement in metal stud.
The owner is on the job
Dino Berg runs the work himself. The person who walked your house and priced it is the person on site while it is being done, and the person who answers when you call afterward. Nothing about your job gets relayed through somebody who never saw it.
Licensed since 2014
CSLB license #989989, active and in good standing, with no disclosable complaints on the public record. You do not have to take that from us — the board publishes it, and checking takes about two minutes.
Verify on CSLBResidential and commercial
A single patch in a hallway and a full commercial tenant improvement in metal stud are both normal weeks here. That matters to a homeowner for one reason: the standards and the sequence that a commercial job forces on you are the same ones that make a house come out flat.
Straight answers on schedule
Drywall is mostly drying time, and nobody controls drying time. So you get the calendar-day answer instead of the optimistic one, and a phone call the day we can see a problem coming rather than the afternoon it lands on you.
What we do
Drywall, start to finish, in houses people live in
Most of the work is residential and most of it is in occupied homes. That changes how a job has to be run more than it changes how a wall gets finished, and both parts are on us.
Repairs and patching
Holes, cracks, nail pops, lifting tape, a ceiling that came down. Cut back to solid board, backed properly, taped with paper, coated wide and blended into the texture that is already on the wall.
Texture matching
Orange peel, knockdown, skip trowel, Santa Fe, lace and hand-troweled work. We make a sample board and hang it on your wall next to the repair before we commit to the patch.
Smooth coat and Level 5
A skim over the entire surface so the wall is one material instead of paper face plus compound. What you want under any sheen above flat, any deep color, and any wall the light rakes across.
Remodels and room additions
Working inside a house people are living in: containment, HEPA vacuum sanding, sealed returns, and a new wall that meets the old one without a line down the middle of it.
New construction and additions
Layout, hang, tape, coat, sand and texture on new framing. The pre-walk before the first sheet goes up is where most of the finished result is actually decided.
Ceilings and popcorn removal
Flat ceilings, vaults, soffits and coffers — plus popcorn removal on a ceiling that has been tested and cleared first. The ceiling underneath is usually the real job.
Water-damage rebuild
After the leak is fixed and the framing is dry, the board comes out to a sound edge and goes back with the right board for a room that got wet once.
Insulation
Thermal and acoustic batts in walls and ceilings, installed to fill the cavity rather than to fill the schedule, before anything gets covered up.
Garages and ADUs
Garage conversions, detached ADUs and the garage itself. Small buildings with the full sequence in them, which is exactly why they go wrong when they are treated as small.
Repair or replace?
The question almost everybody calls with
Patch it, or take the wall out and start over. It is the single most common thing a homeowner wants answered, and it is genuinely hard to answer from the sofa — because the honest version depends less on how big the damage is than on what caused it and what is behind it.
Three questions get you most of the way there. Is it wet, and do you know why? Is the board still holding fastener and still sound at the edges of the damage? And is the surface around it a texture that can be blended, or a hand texture that will have to be floated out across a whole plane? A dry hole in a flat wall is a patch. A wet ceiling nobody has diagnosed is not a drywall job yet at all.
Some of it you can do yourself, and the repair guide says plainly which. A contractor who tells you every hole needs a professional is selling you something.
How the work runs
Eight steps, in order, every time
A drywall job is a sequence, and skipping a step does not save a day — it moves the cost to the end, where it is much more expensive. Here is the short version.
- Step 1
Layout and pre-walk
A drywall contractor makes his money before the first sheet goes up. We walk the framing with the GC or the owner, write down what we find, and lay the sheets out on paper before anything gets cut.
- Step 2
Hang
Ceilings first, then walls, with the wall board run tight up under the ceiling board so the ceiling is carried rather than hanging on its own fasteners.
- Step 3
Fasten and bead
Screws go in to a set depth on a set spacing, then the bead and trim go on. Depth of drive is the whole game at this stage.
- Step 4
Tape
Paper tape bedded into wet compound over every joint and every inside corner. This coat is structural. Everything after it is cosmetic.
- Step 5
Coat
How many coats is not a matter of taste. It is the finish level, and GA-214 is specific about it.
- Step 6
Sand
Hand, pole or vacuum sanding to the specified level. One rule matters more than all the others: do not sand through the face paper.
- Step 7
Texture
Prime first, then spray or trowel to the approved sample. Skipping the primer is the most common reason texture comes out blotchy.
- Step 8
Prime-ready and handoff
The level is complete, the surface is sanded, the dust is gone and the walls are ready for the painter's primer. Then we walk it with the painter.
Learn
Know what you are buying
Most disputes about drywall quality turn out, on inspection, to be disputes about scope that nobody wrote down. These pages exist so you can read the standard yourself before you hire anyone — including us.
Finish levels
The six GA-214 levels, what each one actually specifies, and the three conditions that move a wall from Level 4 to Level 5 — sheen above flat, a deep color, or light raking across the surface.
Textures
Every texture in common use here, how hard each one is to apply, and — the part nobody publishes — how close a patch can realistically get to it years later.
How we work
The eight steps in order, what each one is for, and the failure modes that come from skipping any of them. Written so you can tell whether a bid includes the work or just the words.
Where we work
Where we work
Based in Carlsbad. Two regions get worked week in and week out, and they are close enough together that a callback is a short drive rather than a scheduling problem.
North County San Diego
South Orange County
For general contractors and builders
Building it, not fixing it? There is a separate section for you.
The commercial side of this site is written for whoever is holding our bid: metal stud framing, fire-rated assemblies, shaft walls, acoustic assemblies, suspended ceilings, insulation, and finishing to the level on the schedule. It carries the partition and head-of-wall detail, the backing coordination, and the prequalification facts you can verify in about four minutes — none of which belongs on a page written for a homeowner.
Send the plan set, the project manual and the bid date. If we cannot man it, we will tell you that instead of bidding it and hoping.
Call and describe the wall
Tell us what happened, what room it is in, whether anything is wet, and what the texture looks like. If a photo is easier, text one. You will get a straight answer about what the repair involves and whether it is even worth a truck roll — including the times the answer is that you can handle it yourself.
Dino Berg · Carlsbad, CA · CSLB #989989 · licensed since 2014