How to Touch Up Your Walls | Nail Holes, Ripped Drywall, Cracks, Screw Pops

in this video I'm going to show you how to make this this and stuff like this a little better and we're going to do it right now as you may or may not know I am moving out of my house and with that I took all the pictures the TV and all the stuff off the walls and now I left behind a mess so this video is going to be for someone that maybe has an apartment that you want to move out and get your security deposit back when you do or maybe you're repainting a room and you want to patch all this stuff in before you do that I'm going to show you how to do it so let's get started let's start with the most basic thing that you're going to come across when doing this and that is a screw so real simple when you take your picture off the wall and you take out the screw you're going to have a hole so there are are certain levels of this that I'm not going to get too far into details about it but you might not care that you have a hole in your wall so there's the first level just don't do anything the second thing you can do is just a quick patch and paint and if you want to it depends on what your walls look like too because some walls are kind of a mess and it's not going to make a huge difference I want to do it in a way where it's going to match the wall which is a a new wall so it's going to be close to perfect we're not going to get into the five different levels of a professional drywall finisher because I'm not a professional drywall finisher and I'm sure you aren't either but if you are and you're watching let me know how I did in the comments so for this what I would recommend is just a little can of spackling doesn't have to be dap dry decks but this stuff is cool because it is Pink and then when it dries it dries white so you know that you can patch it or sand it and then patch it so all you want to do is make sure you mix it up a little bit and hit this hole but before you do if you take a real close look you can see that this is going to be raised so if you go to patch that you're going to be able to notice it so you can do one of two things you can take a sanding block and sand it down kind of like this to get it flat and even that there's a little bit of a hump but I will mix this stuff up and just do a little patch just like that overfill it a little bit and then let that dry before we sand it the other option that will show on this screw right here might be a little easier so this also is raised but instead of sanding it what I I can do is take a hammer and just give it a little [Music] tap now that is set in there and you're going to use a little more spackle but that might be quicker for you take some spackle overfill it a little bit while we let that dry we'll move on to the next one next is a screw with a simple anchor like this take the screw out with the screw about at this point what you can do is pull the entire anchor out but that's going to make a big hole so the other option is like on this one same thing is to just leave that anchor in just take the screw all the way out that anchor is a little past this drywall so what we'll do is just tap it like that to sink it in the wall and now this one I have to clean up a little bit I can fill those with this one you could probably get away with one coat but with this one this stuff is probably going to shrink up you might have to do a second coat we'll let those dry now these types of anchors these are the screw ones uh uh those are almost flush but you can sink them in a little bit but what tends to happen is sometimes the drywall will start to bulge out so it might be best to remove these ones again you're going to have a bigger hole spackle will probably shrink up but the good thing about this is you can actually even though this is messed up these are my favorite types of anchors and you can reuse them so that would be my recommendation with those take them right out and just make sure that drywall is flat and you can fill it a little harder to patch bigger holes like this definitely going to have to do a second coat I'll leave it just like that though next is a very common thing this is from a door knob the lock perfectly matches up with that hole so something to keep in mind is in order for these to not have to be patched again you're going to want to stop it from happening so I'm going to put a door stopper on this so that doesn't happen again and once you start getting into something like this or bigger spackle is not the best thing you can definitely use it but you're definitely going to have to do a couple coats and spackle tends to take a while to dry so I'm going to show you some something that I always use that I can use for everything including the small nail holes and even much bigger patches this is the industry standard joint compound well not industry standard really there's blue top and Green Top which is just a little different there's more glue in the Green Top This is a little lighter weight and in fact this stuff is dust control but anything that says joint compound on it like this the premix stuff you can use this but if you want to get your patches done really quick you can use this easy sand five they have 20 they have 45 90 this is a chemical cure it's doesn't really dry it has chemicals in it or when you add water to it it will harden up and this is going to cure a lot harder than the Spackle dries and a lot quicker but be careful if you're new to this because what the five stands for is five minutes of working time so this will start to harden up on you as you're applying it and you don't want that to happen so maybe use easy sand 45 uh if you're doing a lot of patches if you're doing one you can get a much smaller uh bag than this by the way then you could use this I'm just going to mix this on a piece of drywall I'm not mixing up a lot you probably want to use a bucket if you're mixing a lot and make sure you know where all the patches are because once you mix this you're going to want to go around and hit all those patches but for the purposes of this video that's all I'm going to mix up add a little water try and mix it up somewhat quickly a little tiny bit more who that was too much that's okay I'm going to use a Trel which you don't have to use but it makes it easier for me keep mixing and as a tip if you have white walls you're going to want to add some chalk preferably blue chalk if you have it that'll just make it easier to see patches since this is white and if your walls are white it's going to make it hard to see so now I'm just going to take a little bit of this go over to my patch fill that all in kind of like that might need a second coat but I'll just let that cure and then if you take a look right here I have all of these little Nicks I don't even know what this is from but this would be a pain to do with spackle so that's what's nice about this and using a 6-in taping knife is I can take some of this this and do this whole wall or wherever these little Nicks are kind of smooth it out make sure we got it all there's a little one right here and here it depends on how crazy you want to go making the walls perfect totally up to you I could keep going having three kids get a lot of bumps on the wall a lot of dents and dings that looks pretty good while I'm right here I noticed right here this little thing and if I push on the drywall you can see that is the perfect shape of a screw head and we call these screw pops so this is a little different this might not be something that you're trying to fix necessarily if you're moving out of an apartment or something but if you're redoing or repainting a room and you're prepping it you should take care of the screw pops what happens with these is the screw might not have been installed all the way uh and in my case I think it was but this is a 2x3 wall and I remodeled the other side the room on the other side of this wall so when I attached that drywall it could have shifted the framing a little bit and caused this because I have a couple on this side of the wall so the way to fix this is first I need to expose the screw so you can take a knife I'm going to use the tape and knife and I'm just going to take out the loose drywall and sure enough you will see a screw right here so this also could have gone too far and broken the paper of the drywall so I don't want to just mud over this I want to make sure that this drywall is attached atted so if this is sticking out further for whatever reason you're just going to want to tighten it up but I'm also going to add a screw right below or above this one just so I know that this drywall is nice and tight to the stud I'm just going to go under this one and when you're installing drywall screws obviously you can use the drill but the thing you want to do is make sure that the screw head sinks in but it doesn't go far enough to break the paper of the drywall so something like that as long as it is sunk in there that's going to be good just give that a quick scrape you can sand it down if you want to I'll hit that with some easy sand 5 let that cure and I'm going to have to do a second coat on that as well up here I already did the same exact thing thing this is the first coat so now this is the second coat and I can taper this out if I want to make it look even better this takes a little bit of practice but something like that should do good and I can sand it out once it's dry next up Torn drywall paper I hung some pictures up with double-sided tape and when I took them off it took the dry wallpaper with it now as I was saying earlier there is more than one level of how to do this more than one way if you want to just paint this and call it a day I'm not going to stop you I would recommend at least priming it and then painting it because you will see a patch and I'll talk about how to try and make it look a little better when you're just painting a small section compared to an entire wall later in the video but My ultimate recommendation is because you tore this dry wallpaper down there is going to be a noticeable difference between this and this and you're going to see that patch so ultimately I want to Mud this in but if I just take some joint compound and fill this in and try and make it flat and then paint it unfortunately what happens is it will actually start to bubble that joint compound so you want to seal this paper before and the way to do that is to use some primer and then mud it and sand it prime it again and paint it and that is maybe a process that you don't want to go through so if you just want to paint it go ahead but this is how I would fix it so first thing I'm going to do is try and get any of this loose paper and paint off of here now you can see what I'm talking about by those different layers so this is paint and dry wallpaper if when you took this off it just took the paint you could just paint it and not have a problem but this is going to be an issue so get any of the loose stuff TR have to go too too far something like that then I'm going to take a sanding block and try and get this a little smoother because there are like these little burs that I just want to get off of here I want it to look something like this and this by the way I believe is 220 grit you could even do like 180 might be good for something like this I'm going to make all of these look just like that we got a little nail hole right here and as a tip the end of these taping knives you can use that's what it's meant for is to hammer these [Music] in now I want to Prime these spots before I hit them with joint compound and I'm going to use this bin primer I like this because it's in a spray can and it dries really fast about 15 minutes you can use any kind of primer I would suggest an oilbased primer that's really gonna seal this and lock that in so it doesn't bubble out uh this stuff unfortunately is a little stinky so you might want to open up a window um and just cover these spots carefully I have a drop cloth down and I'll just lightly hit [Applause] these you just need a light coat I'm just trying to cover everything as you can see there's overspray because I stored this I think there's something wrong with the tip there might be like some dried up primer but I'll sand all this just try and get all the overspray but that's good as long as it's covered we can let that dry for about 15 minutes let's talk about drywall cracking if you have something like this this is so small but this is pretty common and there's a bunch of different reasons for it but before I get into that I'm not going to worry too much about this all I'll do is kind of scrape down the high spot might hit it with the sanding sponge and you could probably just paint this and that would end up filling this in but I will hit it with some mud and I'll sand the mud and it should be fine if it comes back then I'll address it the way I'm going to address this other one this crack is a little more significant it's still not bad but ignore this by the way this is unrelated this is 100 lb dog that doesn't really like the mailman and the mailbox is right outside here so ignore that but if you focus on this this is basically because two sheets of dry wall come together right here there's a seam and this can be caused by a whole bunch of different things and I think the reason for this is a combination of a couple things number one I remodeled this entire room I took off all the old paneling and drywall reinsulated reframed this entire ceiling and added pieces of wood all along this wall to make it Plum and to bump it out so I could have maybe not secured this as well as I should have uh but also when you remodel something like that things are going to move around especially if you're in a place like Massachusetts like I am expansion and contraction when the seasons change can cause this the thing that you have to think about is if this is bigger or if it's diagonal or if it comes back after you patch it if that's the case then you could have some structural issues with the house kind of settling which every house does but if it keeps happening and it's more severe than this I would say like a/4 inch then you're going to have to investigate and make sure that structurally it's sound but this one I think is from all of that and I may not have used the proper tape I used mesh tape in here and I'll never use mesh tape again let me show you what I use now I use Fiber fuse tape for every seam and I have not had any issues with it I have had really good luck not a single crack basically what this is is fiberglass and it is kind of woven together and the thing that I like about it is it's really thin and as you put joint compound in here it will sink into all these fibers and fuse that together so I'm actually going to rape this and I'm going to use this because I know it's going to do a good job we got to prep this first first thing I'm going to do is kind of open this up and create like a VG Grove so I'm going to gouge it out I'm going to use a knife they actually have a tool for this but if you're just doing one or two of these I wouldn't spend the money on it I just want to make a like a V so that the mud that I put in here we'll fill that in and you can see that mesh tape right here if you get a close look I don't use that stuff anymore because I've had a lot of cracking and I just don't like it and I don't recommend it I can use the knife like this that's pretty good I've now rendered that tape useless anyways CU I cut right through it there's also not a lot of mud in here that could be a reason too so I'm going to open it up more so I can get mud in there another thing that could cause this to be cracking is if the drywall sheets are loose on the stud this one the drywall is nice and tight so I'm not going to add any screws but if your drywall is loose or even if it's not it might be a good idea to add some screws to each side of the the drywall it's going to look worse before it looks better just so you know and I'm going to get a vacuum cuz I made a mess probably should have covered that [Music] heat by the way if you look right here this is okay to just mud because this drywall paper is intact so this was where obviously my dog kind of scraped off some of the mud that that was there and the paint but he didn't get through the drywall paper so unlike the other stuff in the bedroom I can just mud right over this and I won't have a risk of it bubbling up so I'm going to patch that at the same time kind of get all these scratches and everything too while I'm taping this you can use regular premixed joint compound like I showed you in the blue bucket or you can use the easy sand or in my case what I want to use is Duron 90 but this is totally a preference thing I just know that this stuff dries or cures way harder than even the easy sand in fact this stuff isn't meant to be sanded it's used for a tape coat and to fill in big gaps like this it works perfectly so I'm going to use this for this whole patch before I mix this up because you mix it up the same way as the easy sand I'm actually going to cut this to length right here just match it up and cut it so that I don't have to deal with it uh when the mud's on there but to cut this all you got to do match it up where it's going hold the knife right here now you have your piece long as I don't spill on the floor just want to make sure it's mixed up good and there's no big clumps chunk right there I knew it was in there probably want the consistency a little less loose than this but I can make this work just take some of this first going do this right here and then I'm going to prefill this just try and get some of this in there this time get right down to the bottom here try not to make a mess right up to the top okay now I can put some mud on here like this I want to have plenty for that tape to stick to and the good thing is you can't really overload it with this tape because once you put it on you can wipe it and it'll fill in between those fibers just going to hold it like this push that tape in there like that just want it to sit flat like that get the bottom and now I can just put a thin coat over all this to hide all the scratches and to cover this tape I also have some videos on how to mud and tape although I am not the best but I can get the job done and this is really a skill that just you kind of have to practice over time and you get better and better at it and now we're back to our first patch our screw or nail holes and this has turned white so it's ready to sand so I'll sand this one lightly and that's it that's all you need we'll see how this one did put this one on a little thicker that one is good as well those look perfect if you had to you can add a second coat sand it out and the first best thing to make this wall look better is to Prime the entire thing let that dry and paint the entire thing again this is the different levels the second best thing you can do is Prime just these in and paint the entire wall and then the next best thing that you could do is prime these patches and just touch up the paint and then probably the easiest thing you could do is just paint these but don't be surprised if you can see these patches I'm going to do a mix of both I'm going to prime it just right here and then I'm going to try and dry brush this with this color paint to try and just blend it into the wall and that's not going to be perfect because this is a satin and when we talk about finishes of wall there flat satin semi gloss high gloss anytime there's some kind of Sheen to it if you patch something in just a little spot and you look down the wall at a certain angle you're going to see that spot and if you're okay with that that's fine and I'm going to be okay with that but I'm going to try and minimize that by doing something called dry brushing let me show you first thing is I'm going to hit this with primer I'm going to take a brush and just kind of even this out you can kind of see that one that's okay we're going to sand it again that'll just spread the primer a little more evenly I hit this with some sandpaper once it's dry that'll even that out obviously you can see that but that just took that down same thing over here get rid of the brush Strokes nice and flat and now to touch up the paint luckily I save every single color and this is a good idea for you as well it's always good to have extra paint laying around and I know that this is the living room let's touch it up so I'm going to take a little bit of paint and then I'm going to get most of it off of my brush that's why they call it dry brushing and then I'll take the paint and do something like that make sure I cover the patch and then really dry the brush and then I'm going to go like this I just want to kind of try and taper the edges the whole point is to try and feather this out so that you won't notice it as much same thing over here more paint cover that primer dry the brush out and feather out the edges if you take a close look you can still see this and that is why I like to hammer these right in and use the easy sand 5 this is kind of the easiest way to do it by just hitting it with some spackle and sometimes it'll dry up and you'll see it like that but this is good enough for me this is not going to look perfect from a certain angle you're going to be able to see these Patches from a distance it's totally fine I'm not going to go ahead and repaint this entire wall not this one anyways but this one I probably will do the entire wall cuz it's small enough and there's a good majority of things here we got some torn dry wallpaper we got some dents and dings we got screws we have a bad patch job right here done by me um so this wall after I patch all this in I'll probably paint this entire wall then you never be able to tell these patches right here the anchors you do the same exact thing that we just did with those as well as these anchors this patch although once we sand it you probably need a second coat but we do the same thing with that and the same thing with the screw pops just sand this out prime it dry brush it and you're good so now we come back to these and if you take a really close look you can see that there's some fuzzies once you prime it those kind of appear and I want to just make sure that all of this is smooth so I'm going to sand this whole bot out don't have to go crazy going take all the primer off something like that it's fine make sure all these are good I mixed up some easy sand 5 and I can hit all these try and get them like that so it's going to be nice and even something like that might need two coats that looks pretty good though good let it cure now this patch is completely cured you can see it shrunk up a little bit and you can see the tape going scrape it down and do a second coat so I'm going to take my 6in knife and just lightly scrape it I'm just trying to get any of the high stuff off of here that when I do a second coat might fall off and make a line in the mud they'll be annoying I can just clean up any of the unnecessary pieces on the trim too for the second coat I'm going to mix up some easy sand 5 and my goal is going to be to cover this tape but also to feather this out so that the wall looks flat and obviously any of these things that you're doing if you have a textured wall you can do a texture over this you might be okay to do a texture right now although I can see some of the tape right here so it all depends on your situation but going to mix up some five and hit this so coat number two a little bit of crusties in here this is the only problem with mixing stuff up especially if you don't use a like a mixing wand you can get some dried up stuff in here compared to like the premix stuff that wouldn't or shouldn't be a problem but as you work it a little bit should smooth out make sure everything gets covered spread this out a little bit further stuff stuff is drying up already a little difficult to work with bold move doing easy sand five for a big patch like this we're going to make it work leave it just like that might be a little hard to see on camera but basically just feathered out the edges tried to get it as smooth and as flat this way as possible so I think I might be able to get away with two coats if I sand that out if not I'll do three and that looks good for a second coat I think I can get away with just one coat on this so I can sand it and prime it and paint it but with a patch this size because I'm basically just going to have to do this whole thing and the one where we taped it and did a couple coats that's a patch this big that one's under a window so I might be able to feather it out at the edges under the window and it'll look okay but really the best way to make a patch like this look good of this size is to Prime and paint the entire wall but I'll sand this and the other one out and prime it and paint it try and Patch it in and I'll show you what it looks like also with a patch this size I like to use something like this this where I can roll it on with a little 4-in roller also known as a whizzy roller really handy sand up the primer slightly just to smooth out the wall and I can paint it now I have a completely dry brush and I'll try and feather the edges of this paint just try and blend it in kind of knock it down right along the edge so if you look at this from a distance it looks perfect if you look a little closer it doesn't look perfect but it looks pretty good actually I'm surprised in this spot right here I ended up putting another coat of joint compound on sanding it priming it sanding the primer wiping it down and painting it with one coat it actually looks really good the crack is gone it's covered up this is smoothed out it's straight and you can see a little bit of Sheen right here but you really got to look for it that's going to work for me when you're making repairs like this and you call it done correctly or perfect that is kind of subjective because it all depends on your situation and how you want it to look for instance this wall I intended on painting the entire thing but I was running out of paint and this is probably going to get painted all over again anyways and it actually came out just fine so it all depends on your needs and what is going to work for you but if you had a wall that looked like this this or this hopefully this video helped you make it look like this this or this thanks for watching and we'll see you on the next one let's start with the most basic thing by the way my dog is not a psycho as I talk about him destroying my window sill and my wall and everything and saying he hates the mailman he is a very sweet dog he just gets excited and he's 100 lb so he's a big furball I love him skip through this pretty quick Lauren we'll pretend it's not no we won't [Applause] primer primer primer on the heat primer on the heat that's Cash Money Record taking over for the 99 and the 2000 smooth as butter next up Torn dry wallpaper connection shut up I know it lost its connection like 3 weeks ago decided not to paint this entire wall Lauren or for the viewers who are watching basically because I don't have enough paint and I don't want to buy another can though we're just touching it up but again this is just b-roll o this stuff stinks open a window too bad it's 30° out painting b-roll not painting the entire wall making people mad b-roll running out of paint b-roll painting with the wizzy roller why don't you use a 9-in roller b-roll good enough b-roll

Channel: The Fixer

Views: 21,659

Keywords: the fixer, home repair, how to fix your walls, getting your safety deposit back, fix holes before leaving your apartment, patching holes, prime and paint walls, repairing wall cracks, fixing torn drywall paper, how to touch up your walls, how to prep for paint, how to paint your walls, how to patch wall, how to fix wall

Id: Oc2mwcCIULk

Length: 36min 34sec (2194 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2024