Make Ripped Drywall Look New With These Simple Tips

if you've got some torn drywall paper like this you want to repair that but there are several mistakes that are really easy for diy-ers to make because they're not that intuitive to avoid I'm going to walk you through step by step how you can fix this and I'll also point out all of those little issues that you need to watch out for in the process the first thing we need to do is get the area prepped and that means we have to make sure that there's no loose edges like these guys here because we're not going to be able to Mud those over properly so one of the mistakes I see people making is they'll take a sanding sponge and figure I'll just kind of sand this off and then that'll be good but what you might not see is sometimes there's some still some loose edges just sitting under there and those are actually going to cause problems later on so what you need to do is take a putty knife like this or a drywall knife and then get anything that's loose there's a little lip right here want to get that off and see it catches there you may end up making this bigger in the process and that's okay don't go crazy with it don't try to dig under it and you know dig this hole to China kind of thing but see if you can make sure that it gets all the loose stuff off that's really all we're going for another option that some people really like to do is they'll take a blade like this this is my Milwaukee Fastback and then they'll score a circle around it like this I'll just do part of it like so and then that way as you're carving with the knife here it's got a stopping point see even there it didn't stop but it typically gives it a line to stop at and if I would have scored that a little bit deeper then that's going to provide basically a border for that what you just saw is the reason I don't like doing that I figured just keep it as small as you can so with or without that if I just do this lightly I'm going to be able to get that that loose stuff off there just to where it needs to go and then be done with it okay at this point there's nothing that's loose there's nothing that's sticking out and there are no little lips or edges hanging off here and there's also no little pockets underneath so I'm ready to move on to my next step and this is one that most people completely Overlook at this point it may seem like we're ready to go ahead and put some joint compound or some stucco or maybe even paint it and maybe we can get away with that and it would look good especially if you don't have a little divot like I've got right here maybe it's not going to be so bad but there's a big issue with that to better understand that issue I'm going to show you exactly what drywall is made up of and I'll keep this really quick but it's important so that you know why you can't just paint or put mud right over this paper here the top layer of your piece of drywall is just a face paper it's typically light gray like this but under that there are several layers of thin brown paper which is what we typically see in an exposed tear now the paper can get bubbles underneath it and that is exactly what we need to address underneath that is the actual gypsum it's the white stuff that makes up the bulk of the drywall and then lastly is the backing layer of brown paper paper cutting through any of the full layers of paper allows the Gypsum to be snapped or broken and if you don't address those brown layers then that's where bubbles can get formed and little pockets of air or water can get trapped so we know we don't want to trap any bubbles or do anything that's going to cause some air or water to get underneath these layers of brown paper but before we move on to our next step which is sealing this we need to actually make sure that there are no bubbles in here so just run your finger over this make sure there's no actual layers or gaps between the brown paper itself because there are multiple layers of paper in here and as long as that's smooth there's nothing there that we need to remove then we're ready to seal it there's a couple of ways to do this there's quite a few really but there are some that are really just designed specifically for this type of job this is one that's pretty common this is a bin from zinser and this is a spray-on it's one of the cheaper and easier ways to go and it's definitely something that will do the job and probably one of the better ways out there compared to a lot of the Alternatives I'm not the biggest fan of just spraying this stuff on there because I feel like that's not the I do a way to get it to actually permeate it feels like it's kind of surface what I like to use is another product by sensor and by the way there are no sponsors in this video whatsoever this is just stuff I buy myself so this is called guards and this stuff is really just made for exactly this in fact if you read right here it says locked down torn drywall I like to use not only this product but also to apply it with a little roller here and what that does is it allows it to penetrate inside here and seals the whole thing off so I've just got a small amount of this and a tray here we're not trying to get the whole wall or anything we're really just getting this area and that's that's it that's all we need to do but we're going to let this sit for anywhere from about 10 to 30 minutes I'm going to put a fan on this and with a fan on it and a window open this should be dry in about 10 or 15 minutes what you see behind me I'm kind of excited to show you because I wasn't sure if it would actually do it just the way I expected sometimes this happens sometimes this doesn't but do you see this little dark spot right here there's a shadow here because I've got a light shining from the side just to emphasize this but take a listen to the different sounds here this is a patch that I did last week to show you this to show you what not to do now on this one if you're here foreign doesn't sound like the rest of it there's a hollow spot in there what I wanted to show is that if you don't seal this and you just patch over it what you're going to get is something like this it was totally cleaned up just like the other one we just looked at was but the difference is that I didn't seal it and now it formed a bubble I didn't paint it I didn't spray water on it all I did was do a nice light skim coat with mud or some joint compound on here and that's what happened now let's take a look at what's inside here we've got a bubble we've got a hollow spot in here that just oh look at you can see it right in there see the paper moving so that paper now has air behind it and we're going to have to rip up that paper in order to properly fix this that wasn't an issue before but now you see oh yeah look at this right down to the gypsum right down past the paper we got to get that out of there so this is a much larger repair because I didn't do it right if I would have sealed it I wouldn't have this issue and that's exactly why I wanted to show you this so now let's take a listen again that's all the same sound that sounds solid and that means that we've actually taken care of it this time there's no bubbles and now we can properly patch this up like we should have done in the first place at this point our sealer is nice and dry it's dry to the touch and we're not just going to paint over it we might be able to get it to look okay but you'll always be able to see that line right there so we're going to use some joint compound on this to cover it up and we're going to use the same stuff that the drywall or the gypsum is made out of really this is called hot mud right here this is the USG easy sand and there are a bunch of different varieties of this that you can get I'm using the 20 minute mud and that's because 20 minutes gives me enough time to work with it pretty well it's not like a super rush but then I only have to wait a short amount of time in between coats if I need to do multiple coats if you're really competent at this and can do things really fast go for the five minute that's great and then you can just do multiple coats really quick and if you want to give yourself a little leeway maybe go for the 45 minute or even longer and that'll give you plenty of working time with your different mud layers as you go I'm also going to use a metal mud pan I highly recommend spending a few bucks extra the metal is really easy to clean and you can clean it with your knives and then also a nice 12 inch knife like this because this is really forgiving time to mix up some mud that's kind of the consistency I like to do to start this off let me give this a go I'm going to use my 12 inch knife to do most of the work here I still want to go a little thicker because I like to have it to where I can't actually see that ideally kind of like this ah see got a little aggressive I'm just going to take a big glob and just kind of dump it on there and I see I've got a couple spots there where I didn't I've got a little powder in there kind of like if you're making brownies or something a little bit of flour or brownie mix in there and then I'm just doing some Feathering applying some pressure on the outside more than the inside I'm barely just touching on this inside here so that's all I'm going to do for now I've got a pretty broad spread area now just like before I'm going to turn a fan on to speed things up a little bit and see if we can get this thing to dry off as quickly as possible we are now ready to do a little bit of final sanding on our patch job here this will not require a lot of sanding here we're just going to do a little bit and I'm just going to knock down these little high spots and I'm going to do a little bit of Feathering around the outside now on the outside you want to hold it just like you did with the knife you want to hold it a little bit out like this I'm going to hold it away from the center and pushing a little more pressure on the outside just to feather it in there and then get some of this area out here just kind of blend it in and I'm using by the way a 3M medium sponge here and I buy these in six packs they're pretty cheap I'll put some links to those in the description okay that's Blended in that's really all I need to do no need to go crazy with it and now I'm going to do some circular motions in the middle here just like that and we just knocked down that little bit that was left from the knife okay I'm just checking I'm just giving it a visual inspection here I'm going to get some of this down here off a little more right there okay this thing is looking really good and I am now ready once I blow this off and kind of get that loose dust off there to paint now one thing we haven't addressed yet with this is texture obviously you want your patch to match the texture of your wall this wall right here for example actually has a smooth finish all the way across which isn't all that common you might find that you have orange peel on the wall or you have a knock down texture and every wall is going to be a little bit different you can buy bottles like this the spray and this is a knock down right here on this one you can buy the same thing in Orange Peel you can also do it manually if you want to now I won't have the time to get into all of the texturing process in this video but keep in mind that you do have some helps like this these are pretty expensive these are upwards of 25 to 30 dollars [Music] so remember to texture it to whatever you need to to match the wall that's already there now because you saw this process you might know approximately where that patch is but if you're just looking at this you can't see it you can't tell there's no indication really of where that patch was in fact me looking at it right now I can't see anything at all that shows me where that patch may have been and that's the way we want it I'm Nils with learn to DIY thanks for watching

Channel: LRN2DIY

Views: 547,194

Keywords: diy, how-to, lrn2diy

Id: 4anifphxDnk

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 01 2023