How to REPAIR DRYWALL the EASIEST way for DIY!!!

welcome to Vancouver carpenter today I'm going to show you guys the easiest way to do a patch now this is not the fastest way to do a patch and this is not necessarily the most professional way to do a patch but this is going to be the easiest and simplest way for anybody who's never done a drywall patch to do and for anyone who's never cut drywall before it's pretty straightforward you just make a small line in the drywall and once it has this score mark it snaps so it's really easy to cut but anyways what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this piece I'm gonna put it right here and I'm gonna really gently score this with a knife you could also draw it with a pencil too because there's a possibility you could do this too small by accident I'm making sure to go a little bit bigger than this piece of drywall careful not to cut yourself all you need to do is just score the paper you're not trying to cut through it in one go so it's hard to see my outline right now but now I'm just gonna follow through with my cuts and I'm just pushing a little bit harder on each one careful not to go past not the end of the world if you do but you know better if you don't so sometimes I'll stop there and I'll start again from the bottom just to make sure I don't slash too far well I've said it so who knows maybe I've jinxed myself my videos tend to go that way okay now I can kind of start to push on this so you could use a drywall saw to do this or you could just you know keep pushing until you know you're actually through this one like that but once you're able to break it then you can just cut the paper on the back pretty easy but remember just take it easy don't push too hard and cut yourself really sucks most of us in the trades have done that once let me know in the comments get in there okay I've got all the loose paper out then I've got solid drywall all the way around the next thing I'm going to do is install some plywood backing so you can see it's about an inch and a half longer than the hole itself so you just put that up here and down here so make sure to overlap it about an inch and a half or an inch I prefer to use plywood because it doesn't split when you put screws into it as for screws you want inch and a quarter drywall screws coarse thread drywall screws if you're going into wood so put one screw right down here how far to sink it is really important let's get into that it needs to go just far enough that you can't hear it but not so far that it tears the paper if you send it so far through that it tears the paper the screw isn't holding properly and it could blister I'm gonna put one more screw up here and I usually like to put one on the edge right here hopefully my woods wide enough just but that's also why I like plywood if this was a one by and I was only grabbing a little bit of the meat there it would just split the wood this is 3/4 ply 1/2 inch ply is actually the best because it takes up the least amount of space in the wall same thing screw here and now my piece bit nice and snug one thing I could have done when I was marking out the hole is I could have gone like this and then that way I would have known which way to orient the board but it was still the same way I had it last time this parts pretty straightforward the patch is only about 6 by 6 or even 5 by 5 so only needs four screws one thing you need to look for is that all the drywall is solid so there's no loose chunks and blisters all around your edges so this one actually has this big blown out chunk right here that's gonna cause a blister so that's a little bit unfortunate that I have that massive gap now but it's not the end of the world next we are gonna use just fiberglass mesh tape and I know I've gone on and on in other videos about how good paper drywall tape is and it really is the best but for a small little 6x6 patch like this you can get away with using mesh tape and not have any problems in fact you can use mesh tape on a lot of things and not have any problems but there are some stipulations I have other videos about that check out my mesh vs. paper tape video if you're interested in finding out what the differences are so I just hold my knife like this and pull upward to tear it it's really quite easy but that might be challenging for you at first so you can also cut this with a knife or with scissors trying not to overlap it just to keep the build out to a minimum for me that wouldn't be a I could overlap this about three layers and cover it pretty easily but for somebody who is inexperienced the less overlap the better because then you're gonna not have to build it out so far okay so that's all done and now I have some all-purpose mud this is all purpose heavy weight all-purpose light would also be adequate and so what I'm going to do is I'm not actually worrying about building this out too much yet I'm just embedding the tape again this is the easiest way to do it not the most professional so what I'm suggesting you guys do is just put a thin skim over top of the mesh tape this spot needs a little bit extra mud because the bit shallow but anyways it's a thin skin and push lightly so that you're not sliding the mesh tape all around you may see that some of the fibers like this get a bit loose you might have to pull them off or cut them but again I'm just embedding the tape I'm going to feather my edges so what that means is I'm pushing down on the blade like this I'm like putting pressure on it feathering my edge so I don't leave any big lumpy spot snaps and I'm doing it in a sequence so it is from the left eye angled it like that and then I'm gonna angle it like this a little bit now I'm actually wiping it too much for no good reason so I'm gonna leave it but the sequence is like this and then pass like this like this like this I'm gonna leave this and let this dry so this has had a chance to dry overnight now there's a couple of things that I forgot to get into so one of them is knife size so the first one I used was just a 5 inch knife you could use a 5 6 8 inch knife it really doesn't matter for that first little bit where you're just embedding the tape but for this next coat I'm gonna be using a 10 inch knife which is a lot more handy that way we're just gonna do a couple of passes over this and it's gonna cover really nicely the other thing is that consistency of your drywall mud so what you can do is you can just put your drywall mud straight out of the bucket into a pan and then just add a little bit of water and just kind of move it around until it gets thin down a little bit until it's fairly consistent so this one's a little bit wet it's dripping and you want it a tiny bit thicker than that but on the other hand it's kind of easy to work with except it gets a bit messy anyway so let's take a look at this patch and get to the second coat as we can see there's some really basic tool lines a big crack here from the drywall mud shrinking where the lift off was and it got a little bit fuzzy right here when I messed with it that one time that's why I didn't mess with it much because otherwise the tape starts getting all messed about so I just put the mud on and then left it it's also flat enough that it doesn't really need to be scraped and what I really don't want to do is start trying to scrape it and then just like get the tape off fuzzed up again so now what we're gonna do is cover this and I want to make sure that I really get it covered almost into the corner here so I'm gonna start about 6 inches above the start of the patch and this is just some gooey like I said pretty wet all-purpose I'm not gonna be able to get this looking really good in one patch you want to be going for like you know roughly a small 8 so big 16th of an inch over top of that tape you don't know what that means well maybe it's three thirty-seconds I'm staying away from that corner chunks I'm just getting a nice even spread here making sure that it's consistent all the way along so now what I'm going to do looks like I may as well just go right up to the corner here so now it's time to feather the edges so we're gonna start on this one first so what that is is just pushing really hard on the blade like so one one down this side oh we got more crumbs in the mud I haven't been into this bucket for a little while you know what I'm just gonna leave that because we're gonna do another coat on this let's get that feathered bottom one feathers and now we're just going to pass down this a few times real gently real quickly and you know what it may not look that pretty but I've got enough mud on there and these are gonna get sanded off and it's gonna get skimmed one more time so I'm gonna leave it like this so again what I did was pressure on the one side to feather flatten it out flatten it out and then pressure on the other side to feather again and that leaves most of the material here so if you can still see your tape at this stage there's not enough mud on here so I always like to make sure that the tape is totally buried it is now everybody's favorite time sanding time this has had overnight to dry it's fully dry and normally I would be using a nice flat sanding pole to sand this but I'm gonna suffer along with the do-it-yourself crowd and just use a sanding sponge because if you're just trying to patch one little hole in the wall this is what I recommend don't go buying a big Santa pole sander one handy little tip is you can use your pan push it up against the wall and just sand really gently and a lot of that best is all just gonna fall into the pen also I highly recommend wearing a mask so when I'm done talking I'm gonna go do that but basically just try and sand gently and relatively flat like so you're not pushing too hard on any of your line just with a nice flat steady hand and you're just gonna go until these liftoffs the lines get smaller now that this is done you can probably see that it's not perfect like there's still some imperfections so I didn't sand it down until it was totally flat I just took off all the high spots so this stuff is probably going to bubble like crazy as soon as it starts going on whenever you're doing a patch on a wall that has been previously painted it loves to bubble over all the parts that aren't new drywall so there will be one square where it doesn't bubble too bad and that is the new chunk of drywall and all the rest of it is gonna bubble like crazy so there's a trick to getting around that well there's not really any getting around it it's double the work you got to skim it twice basically so I'm just loading all the mud on here and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull off everything I just put on and you know when you haven't been mixing your mud for a while you get chunks in the mud anyways I'm gonna go in this direction actually and I'm pulling it off really hard so what this is doing is it's filling all these pinholes let's get a look up close so you can see those I mean it's just a nightmare right there hate that and then as we go up here right just this one spot where I'm working on filling them in but it's getting better and they're just those bigger holes that were left you still need to be filled in alright let's get back to this I'm gonna go up so the reason I'm going up is a lot of time when you put the mud on in one direction and take it off in the other direction that can help fill in the holes so that doesn't pinhole is severely I have a little ding in my blade that's leaving a line so I'm gonna get some sandpaper and sand that out really quick my tools may not have been handled as nicely as I like them to be recently but I have nobody to blame but myself for that that should take care of it ok we're gonna do another skim theory and on this one we're actually gonna try and leave some of the material on instead of wiping it all off so tight the reason is when you leave a little bit on you leave this nice sanding coat so that if there's any deficiencies in it you can sand it out instead of having to fill it again at the touch-up stick which there shouldn't be touch-ups for a little patch like this yeah I'm going to feather my edge at the bottom probably can't even see that we've gone so wide feather the top edge and narrow again we're gonna do that series of passes like I talked about feather it on this side oh you know when you got too many crumbs in the mud it really doesn't help [Music] got some more bubbles here Chuck says sand and what is happening okay now it's a lot of messing about but I'm happy with it now uh until I did that can you believe it there we go now let's take a look at that so that's where I feathered up into the paint there's the patch and it's all looking pretty smooth except for some of those crunchies I had in the mud but it'll all sand out real nice down there you see there's nothing but just lift off a couple of bubbles I'm just gonna live with those looking pretty good this patches had a chance to dry overnight but I'm not a hundred percent happy with it now I'm gonna give away one of my trade secrets to you guys so I don't ever like to touch up drywall after I've sanded it what can tend to happen is you sand the drywall and then you go and you put a touch-up on it and then you try and sand that touch up later and it leaves a Ridge so it like sands at a different consistency than the sanded mud and so you can always see the outline where the patch is how I like to avoid that is I actually do the touch-ups before I sand so we are right up close now and you can see I mean this is just hollow right here so I know I'm gonna have to over sand it to get rid of that so what we're gonna do is we're going to put a little bit of dry my down here and we're gonna do it real gently and quickly so what I did is I was really careful to not compress the mud so if I pressed really hard then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna compress this patch so this patch right here is gonna be harder than all the surrounding stuff because it gets super compressed by the knife so you want to make sure you don't leave a thick amount on or a compressed amount on right here we got a bit of bubbles I know these are gonna cause me problems down the road so I'm just gonna really quickly scrape them to try and open up any of the ones that are sealed same thing so of course I can't sand that right away but what I can do is put a fan on it right away go do something for ten minutes come back and sand it now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the light I'm gonna shine it directly down the wall so that I can see everything and now I'm gonna get my mask on and sand away and again I'm gonna tough it out with just the sanding sponge see how long it takes so now that I have my light though I can see everything so I'm not gonna be over sanding anything I also don't want to use the tan this time because I don't want to scratch the wall with it rubbing it against it I'm just gonna go really slowly and gently and the dust is all gonna fall straight down so I'm not pushing too hard I'm not grinding the sponge in anywhere I'm just going nice and flat and often in circular motions it really helps to make a nice smooth patch they use the angled part to get right into the corners these angled sponges are the best and even though this looks really good I take care to make sure that I really blend those edges in this spot is one of the biggest beginner mistakes people leave this part heavy and you can clearly see the texture of the old wall and then the nice clean patch of the new wall in this case you're going to see it anyways because I haven't repaired the rest of the wall look at that I often check with my hands because my hand can feel what the sanding sponge can't okay one thing I'm definitely guilty of in my videos is not showing you guys the finished product so I got some primer here it's almost as thick as the drywall mud I was using having to open this in in a long time well we'll get some primer on here and take a look at the finished product and see how it is this is just a nice I think this has been 1 2 3 primer sealer great stuff anything I'm using in this I will try to link in the description below if you guys are looking for it should help your life go a little easier using the same stuff I use well it won't help your life but it might help your patch get a nice thick coat on there nothing like a good coat of primer to lay a good foundation put the fan back on this come back when it's dry happy with that okay looking nice and dry you only took about five minutes this came out real good the only defect I can really see is over here it's like I could have spent a little more time sanding that edge but that's really up close like let's go way back here I mean it's small but yeah other than that it's looking real sharp all around there's actually probably one of the better patches I've done in a long time not that any of the patches I've done have been bad they're just slowing it down like that and sanding it by hand and having the light on it just helped me bring it up to that next level you know to make it way better than every other part of the wall so now it's gonna stand out because the rest of the wall looks like garbage and this part looks good well that was in my opinion the easiest way to patch a hole in the wall so I think for anybody who's never done this before that's gonna give you a pretty good idea of what you need to do to pass just about any hole on the wall from you know like a fist size to a foot size also I just want to give a huge thanks out to all of the subscribers and anyone who's been watching the videos over the last while so it is right now 2020 January and I generally don't like to date my videos by saying the dates but right now I've recently had my wife break her arm and so it's been a real struggle to put out videos and a lot of you guys have been watching stuff over this last month and it's been a huge help to us because I really haven't been able to work very much I want you to know that it's not just me you're supporting I have four kids that we're trying to raise the best we can and so you guys watching the videos help support six people so that is a huge help thank you very much to anyone who's been doing that and I hope you have a fantastic new year or whenever this is maybe you're watching this in you know July of 2021 and none of that really matters except for the fact that thank you that does matter so until the next video guys I really hope you're getting something out of these thank you for the support

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 474,217

Rating: 4.908102 out of 5

Keywords: drywall, patch, hole, wall, repair, plaster, spackle, paint, taping, mudding, tape, mud, joint, skim, finish, fastest, level 5, DIY, painting, beginner, tutorial, chalkboard paint, framing, carpentry, woodworking, trim, baseboard, casing, door, window, floor, flooring, tile, tile setting, concrete

Id: 4L0EuDjd0fw

Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2020