Drywall in San Clemente

The Hanson-era core around the Pier Bowl and North Beach is 1920s and 1930s construction: plaster, arched openings, deep window reveals, rounded arrises and heavy hand texture floated on with a trowel by somebody long gone. Matching that is a craft problem rather than a product problem, and the only honest way to price it is to make a sample, hang it on the wall and look at it in the room's own light before agreeing on anything. The hillside tracts from the 1960s through the 1980s are more conventional — orange peel walls, sprayed ceilings on the older half, and everything built in or before 1980 sitting inside California's asbestos presumption until it is tested. Forster Ranch, Marblehead and Talega bring 1990s and 2000s production Mediterranean with knockdown ceilings and two-story plans. Topography is the physical constraint everywhere: houses step down the slope toward the water, so the room that needs the work is often two floors up from where the truck can park, with a deck in between. And salt air plus a slope means the water-damage calls here tend to come from above — a deck membrane, a window head, a flat roof over a converted garage.