Drywall in Encinitas, Leucadia and Cardiff

Along the 101 and through Leucadia the stock is 1950s and 1960s beach cottage, and almost none of it is original any more. These houses have been added to repeatedly — a back bedroom in 1972, a bathroom in 1988, a kitchen wall taken out in 2015 — so a single room can hold plaster, half-inch board, five-eighths board and three different textures meeting at the ceiling line. Getting that to read as one surface is most of the work, and it is usually a skim across the whole plane rather than a patch. Moisture is the other constant. The marine layer sits until mid-morning most of the year, north-facing walls under a tree never really dry, and the failures that follow are slow: a soft corner behind a shower, board that has wicked water up off a slab, a ceiling stain that comes back every February. New Encinitas is 1970s and 1980s tract through Village Park and Sunset, with sprayed ceilings on the older half. Olivenhain is another country entirely — acre lots, custom homes, high ceilings, hand-applied textures and scopes measured in weeks.