Video: How to Patch Drywall

GILROY — Host, Sarah Rutan: If you have a damaged area of drywall in your home, you’ll be glad to know it’s fairly simple to repair. Today we’re in Gilroy with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Charles Irwin of Irwin Construction to learn how it’s done.

Diamond Certified Expert Contributor, Charles Irwin: Today we’re going to show a tip on how to do a drywall repair. I’m sure that you’ve had a doorknob or something that flies through the wall. You have a hole like this. Maybe a little bit bigger, from, you know, a door handle, or something like that. And we’re going to show you how to do a repair on that.

What we’ll do is we’ll tape it, which is what this stage looks like. And then we’ll top it. And then we’ll feather in the edges with a sponge. And then we’ll use something that you can make at home, basically a little plastic bag. You can use a Ziploc or some Visqueen that you have laying around. Get some tape, tape up a handle on it so that you’ve got a little device. And you use this to dip in the mud and put the texture on the wall. And that’s what we’re going to show you today.

So, the first step that we do is we cut out the patch and we put a plywood piece behind it. You can use a small stick. A paint stick is a little bit thin. Something a little thicker than that, you know, a half inch, 3/8, maybe, minimum. And put that behind the patch. We’ll screw in our patch.

And then we will tape it using taping compound. This, what we’re using today, is a hot mud that dries in either 5, 15, 45, 60, or 90 minutes. I would not recommend using the 5-minute, unless you need to get the patch done quickly. We’ll tape the patch. Then you need to let it dry. And then you top it. And then you need to let that dry.

Then you come in with a sponge. You feather in the edges. And this is the biggest secret that people mess up on all the time, and including professionals. You need to feather in the edges so that you can’t see it after you’re done painting. You take the plastic bag that you made and you dab it into the pan. And then you just kind of just speckle it onto the wall, just like that.

Let it dry just a little bit, maybe a minute. And then wipe it off with a [00:02:06 tral phonetic]. If you notice that it’s wiped off too much, scrape it off and start all over. All the mud is water-soluble. If you get any on the carpet, and you get any on your hands, you’re not happy with it on the wall, you can wipe it off with a sponge.

Host, Sarah Rutan: To learn more from local top rated companies, visit our Diamond Certified Expert Reports at experts.diamondcertified.org.