What is the relative humidity in your house?



The reason most of the these cracks occur is because of low humidity in the house causing the joints to shrink.  Some houses can take a couple of years to actually get the relative humidity down far enough to cause these issues.  I doubt it is a significant structural issue.  Cosmetic problem.

The ready mixed mud is good for going over paper tape,stippling ceilings, and for the crews who use "tools" bazookas, banjos,mud boxes, etc.
Ready mix or what we call it "bucket mud" has a bit of latex in it and it tends to shrink up and crack. We "my family" have been using quick dry powdered joint compound or "sack mud" mostly for the last 50 yrs or more.
It dries faster lessening the shrinkage and allows for faster successive coats to be applied in a day.

We glue and nail and it holds better than screws in our experience. It is a tad more costly due to the cost of glue but it allows us to get the rock up a lot quicker.

That stuff is basically just a hydrated lime mix isn't it?

I do a lot of mix designs for stucco using lime and portland, but I have never actually done any indoor plastering or sheetrock taping.

This is often the case nowadays. A lot of the drywall contractors use the quick set mud so they can be in and out of a job faster, this stuff sets up and is ready to sand in 20 minutes or so but is much less resilient than the 24 hour cure time mud. Quick set should only be used as a skim coat or for minor repairs, not the initial application on new construction.

Best fix is to grind or scrape out the cracked area and re-mud with an acrylic mortar, if it has not been taped then you have a little more work to do to make it right. I would get in touch with the builder on a new home and have them do the repairs, especially if you have a homeowners warranty.

There's your problem right there. Most the houses in Vegas were built as fast as possible by low-skilled labor of questionable immigration status.

You should see the sketchy shit I've repaired in my late 70's Vegas home.




Come on by the HTF and say hi sometime.

When I had a new house built in Arizona the first year the drywall was cracking everywhere.  In the first year a house is built you lose a bunch of moisture as studs continue to dry, concrete continues to cure, stucco and dry wall mud continues to lose moisture, paints cure.  I had them come in and fix everything under the 1 year or so home warranty.  Over 15 years I still had to caulk corners and repaint.

I recently bought a home in Michigan that is on a small island.  I painted all the drywall before I moved in.  The humidity is extremely high in the warm months and extremely low in the winter even when using a humidifier.

Drywall cracks seem to open up in the winter (along with doors warping) and then everything goes back to normal in the warmer weather.  Temperature extremes vary up to 120 degrees with the seasons.

 

Really? I've only worked on homes for 37 years. If you have a home with large open areas and it is properly engineered you will need/find shear walls with plywood sheathing under the sheetrock to prevent the wall from flexing and breaking butt joints. In OP's case it does not sound like this is what the issue is but at the time I had little info to go on. And yes, it is likely the drywallers fault for a crappy hang or tape job. Like I said, if minor caulk and paint it.

 

Man I hate to bring this up but..... My brother and I bought this house several years ago to flip.  The price was right, but it needed a lot of work on the interior.  We had cracks running vertically in the walls.  The previous owners had been big do it yourselfers and had moved interior walls hung additional doors etc.   We started looking closely and it was evident that everywhere we had a vertical crack in the wall it was because the assholes had not used tape between the sheetrock joints!  We ended up putting in about 20 new pieces of sheetrock.  We had to shim the studs to even things out and used fiberglass mesh tape between the joints.  What a pain in the ass.  The Bain of every   remodeler or flipper is a previous homeowner who did there own repair work and though they knew what they were doing.

Try the fiberglass mesh tape, I had one seam in a cathedral ceiling that kept opening from ceiling to floor. Over 10 years now with no issues after using the mesh tape.
For shorter cracks you can use latex caulk, get it well into the crack then paint, this also works in awkward places like window corners.