Is The Ceiling About To Fall Down??

Odd_Job

Hi - any idea what these two sticking out circles could be and how much of a problem?

It’s a ceiling, plaster board and skimmed about 3ish years ago. These lumps/patches weren’t there a few days ago.

My guess it’s the screws keeping the ceiling up starting to come out and displace the skimmed plaster, but not sure.

Any thoughts or advice would be hugely appreciated. Thanks.

MyRealNameToo

What's the distance/gap between the centre of the two circles?

What's above?

Do you know if the joists run parallel or perpendicular to the wall in the photo?

The screw theory doesnt really sound logical to me

stuart45

Cut out where the screw or nail has popped and you will see the problem. You can then put a few more screws in near to them and use a decent filler such as Knauf fill and finish to repair it. Do you know if they used nails or screws to tack the ceiling? Nails are more likely to pop.

Odd_Job

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81924657#Comment_81924657

Thanks - this is what’s there when I’ve now cut it away. It’s a screw.

Directly above this is the bath.

Looking around this room, there are a few smaller ones like this now. I’ve cut one of them away and that’s a screw under it too.

Any thoughts what would be causing it? Is it a plasterer or builder best suited to have a look?

Thank you again

stuart45

It's movement in the ceiling, especially under the bath where there's a lot of weight. It's not normally a serious issue. It probably needs some extra screws put in. If it's an older house the joists were sometimes undersized, especially when there wasn't originally a bathroom upstairs.

vacheron

They call them popped screws, or "poppers" in the trade.

It's just the plasterboard screws /nails that hold the plasterboard moving and settling and in doing so, pushing the plaster on top of them off the board. The fact that their is a bath above may have exaggerated the movement.

When we had our extension built we had about half a dozen appear after about a year.

The ceiling isn't coming down, there are dozens of these screws / nails holding the boards up, and you are only seeing one or two of them. 👍️

Bigphil1474

We had these in our old house after having the ceiling reboarded. About 4 were noticeable. I just removed the popped plaster, made sure the screws were tight, filled in and repainted.