How to Remove and Fill Drywall Anchors

hello and welcome to Vancouver carpenter so I don't know if you've ever struggled with removing drywall anchors but in the past before I learned this really simple trick I have so I'm going to show you this real easy trick I use but first in order to understand how to remove them it helps to understand how they work so here's a drywall anchor now the drywall is a half-inch thick so what happens is when you first put the anchor in this thing's nice and closed up like so and as you push this in and then start to feed the screw in what happens is this starts to expand and it creates a bunch of friction and you can also see the way these little wedge things are shaped that helps it not withdraw as easily so basically it just creates a little wedge so what you'll need is a screw a screwdriver and a hammer of some kind or pliers anything that you can grab at the end of the screw with so this is a really easy job and all you're gonna do is you're just gonna put the screw into the anchor just a little bit so maybe like a quarter is just enough till it bites I'm just gonna pull it up the reason that works so easily is because you don't put the screw in far enough to start to spread these just take it out really quick and easy in that case I even just pulled it out with my hand but you can also use the law of a hammer really easily next that's really quickly fill these and they're not got all this put a little bit of filler on each one using a one-inch putty knife here make sure that actually gets full now I usually use regular drywall mud but I just didn't have any with me today I'm doing this now to grind in all the loose bits of paper so that I can now coat them flush so now I'm going to do this again and so these are gonna take a few coats will take two or three depending on how much it shrinks now you've got that loose paper out of the way this stuff is not as easy to work with this drywall might wonder I always use it now if you don't want to have to do two or three passes on these and you don't mind sanding what you actually can do at this stage is actually put it on thick so right there I've got it on about an eighth of an inch thick and now what's gonna happen is all that shrinkage that was going to occur who's gonna happen above the surface of the wall and when this is dry I can sand this all down it's gonna be nice and flat because it will have had some room to shrink so that's my simple trick how to deal with those so the screw I was using is a number eight screw and that is the thickness of the diameter so you're number eight is your standard framing screwed use your general sort of all-purpose screw number six is a smaller one drywall screws are number six and number ten you might need those to get out some of the wider plugs any of those screws can be found in your big-box stores if you don't happen to have one of those jars full of every sort of random screw that most homeowners have but yes just look down the aisles of a big-box store and you're gonna see number six number eight number ten number twelve I don't know how much bigger they go I think by that point you're starting to get into a lag bolt anyways that's my simple so thanks for watching Vancouver carpenter be sure to stay tuned I'm always posting videos with lots more little tricks of the trade if you found this video useful or you want to support the channel just do all those youtubey things and like subscribe and blah blah blah anyways until the next video

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 832,828

Rating: 4.8509545 out of 5

Keywords: drywall, repair, anchor, remove, fix, patch, wall, ceiling, open, fill, casing, carpentry, filler, spackle, mudding, taping, hole, renovation, remodel, DIY, paint, painting, how to

Id: dwSZUZ50Z78

Length: 4min 9sec (249 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 02 2019