5 Ways to Repair Drywall You Didn't Know

We all have drywall that needs to be repaired. Whether it's kids swing the doors way too hard, puncturing through the drywall, or maybe your crazy drunk ex decided to put their fist through the wall, and you probably avoided repairing it strictly because nobody's ever taught you. It could be an intimidating process. Well, today I'm going to show you five different ways to repair drywall that you could do today. Let's get started. We'll be going over five different methods based on the hole size that needs to be repaired. And we'll be ranking them from a scale of 1 to 10 of how easily approachable they are. And for a bonus feature, I'll show you how to pair drywall that's beyond patchwork. So, we have a perfectly good hole here. And the way we're going to prepare it was one of the most approachable DIY applications where you simply just buy a patch at the store. These patches are very approachable for anybody to pick up. Sometimes they even sell an entire kit where you get not only the patch in different sizes that you decide to get the kit, but you also get the putty knife and the actual compound that goes the mud essentially around. To get started, it couldn't be easier. Just take it out of the box, peel back the backing. It has a metal mesh in the middle of it. This is plastic or fiber essentially. And this is just your kind of galvanized looking steel. Put that right over. Stick it on right there. Our goal here is going to be to fill this puppy and making sure all of our mud is going to stay on this drywall patch. Now, me personally, I'm not a huge fan of those pink kits. I don't like the little mud knife that they have. It's plastic. It sucks to use. The mud is only like this much. It's great for a small little hole, but not for a bunch of fixes. So, I just usually just buy regular old mud compound in a bucket because it's already premixed. I'll get myself a metal drywall knife. But here's the thing. This stuff has been sitting on the shelf god knows for how long. So, all the good stuff has been kind of settling down. Kind of like paint. When you buy it, you want to mix it up. So, I'll just use a little paddle mixer here. Give it a few swirls. Get everything nice and mixed. And you'll be surprised how much more fluid this stuff really becomes as opposed to looking like, I don't know, clay. That's a little [music] too much. There we go. Get it on there nice and deep, boy. You don't need to go nuts with this. Just get it all blended up. It's already looking moist. Some drywallers will actually put a little bit of Dawn dish detergent in there, [music] uh, or a little bit of water. it'll mix it up. The dish detergent makes it a lot smoother and slicker on your uh drywall knife. Uh and the water really just kind of dilutes it. So, lawn dish detergent works a lot better. And I think I saw somebody use Windex, but I'm not too sure if I'm thinking of the right thing. Tray here. Throw a little bit on there. Make sure a drywall knife is always clean. That's why you can't do those on those plastic ones. They glue up and gunk up so fast. And then what you want to do is start spreading it. Doesn't matter how. Left to right, top to bottom, who cares? Building stuff can be intimidating and difficult. So, we need to find places where we can just simplify things. Simplify things, understand things. Then, after you got a good amount on there, you want to start working its way out in a circle to blend it. Now, the reason why you want to do that is because this mesh sits higher than the finished drywall. So, what we want to do is put a little bit more pressure on the outsides so we can blend it nicely. And then just control your pressure so that you can't see that mesh. By the way, I'll tell you exactly why [snorts] this patch is steel reinforced down the middle. Cuz if you didn't have that steel mesh there, everything that we're putting on right now would start bubbling out this way cuz that would be heavier. So, it' be essentially pulling everything down. Get it clean again. We got a nice little covered area. This is going to dry overnight. Then we're just going to lightly sand it with 120 to 220 grit sandpaper. Get it all blended. If you sand a little too much and the mesh is exposed, give it a nice light coat. As long as you don't see that mesh, you'll be ready for texture. In our situation, there's no texture. So, we're just going to wait tomorrow, sand it, and then give it a roll of paint and it should be great. I'm going to give this a solid 9.5. Why? because you could just walk in the store, buy this kit. They have them in different sizes. This is the smallest one and I think one that's like a 12 x 12 is the biggest. Uh, however, it's not going to be the strongest bond just because you have nothing but mesh and some thicknesses, probably pretty small of drywall mud in the in the middle of it. So, basically, you're fixing the hole, but it's going to be a weak spot. 9.5. I'm comfortable with that. Number two on the list is the double-sided tape trick. Now, that's the way I call it. I don't know the official name for it, but I recently learned it and it's probably my favorite repairs. It's usually preferred on smaller holes like this. And here's how you start. First, get as much of it of this drywall compound inside the hole that you can. Like I mentioned earlier, if we put drywall tape over it, it's just going to start oozing out and bubbling out on us and it's going to suck. Then spread more mud around the area. You only need a few inches on each side. Next, you're going to grab yourself some drywall tape. This is very inexpensive. Usually like around four bucks for a big old roll. You're going to lay some covering the hole a few inches on top and the bottom. Now, don't cut the whole tape off. Double it in size and cut it off like that. Then, you're going to spread all that mud around it. And all the excess mud, you're going to put it right over your tape. This is where the magic happens. We're going to take the bud of our drywall knife and we're going to press that hole in. Counterintuitive, right? I know. Then we're going to take more mud and we're going to start packing it inside that hole. Then all we're going to do tear off the excess and lay this right over top. Squeegee out the rest of it lightly, not too much. And then cover the tape all the way around. Like I said, this is my absolute favorite repair method. And because it's my favorite, it's going to get a good ranking, however, not better than the last one. This is going to be a 9.2. And the reason it's a 9.2 is strictly because of the hole size. We're strictly limited to the width of our drywall tape. But what's beautiful about this method is you can run and gun. If your landlord is like, "Hey, you got to move out, but make sure you fix all the patched holes and stuff." You can come through with your mud and your your triel, start covering all the little holes with screw holes, and then for anything that has a big hole like that, you can use this double-sided tape trick. You won't have anything oozing out. It won't bubble up on you, and it'll be extremely strong. We probably have 3/8 of an inch of drywall mud in there, if not even close to/ an inch. Strictly based off of the stuff that we pushed in there and two layers of tape that also have mud between them. Fantastic, fantastic tip to have in the back of your toolbox. Keep it in your pocket. Trust me, you'll love it as much as I do. One of the most important things when working with drywall is keeping your tools clean. Specifically, your drywall knives. It'll make it a far smoother application, which I just noticed. I wasn't doing a good job keeping my new shirt clean. This set I'm trying to clean. Have you guys seen this area that I built? Dude, it's freaking my favorite part of my backyard. It's now it's a definitely a backyard oasis. I put a 300 square f foot PA patio pad out here. Came out awesome. Got it matched with a nice smokeless fire pit. This puppy roars, but I did screw up on something. If you've seen that video or not, I built this cavity about 5 in wide and when it gets hot, it started to throw a few cracks. I have three along there. I'm going to try to salvage it with Portland uh Paris of what is it? What are they called? Plaster of Paris. They use it on like blacksmithing kils that might insulate it and then I could use Portland cement on the outside and then maybe some stucco. But in hindsight, I should have just doubled up. But then I also made some sick Pottery Barn replica chair. I guess modern version of chairs. If you guys haven't seen them, go check them out. The videos came out awesome. I'm really proud of how this area works. Let's move on to drywall repair number three. We're moving on to this little fake stage that I set up strictly because I didn't want to puncture more holes in my shop here. But this method I absolutely love because this is how I got started repairing drywall. This was my go-to method for the long time. So, what we'll need is a scrap piece of wood here first. We need to create a nice clean area here. So, let's get ourselves a square and we're just going to trace the absolute minimum amount that we need to take off. Then, to make your life easier, use a drywall knife. These work great strictly because of how coarse these blades are. You can also use a multi-oscillating tool if you have one. That goes so much quicker than this. Ain't nobody got time for that. Not to mention the oscillating tool is going to give you cleaner lines. Our hole is cleaned up. Now, we're just going to take a scrap piece of wood that's going to be able to stretch all the way across this section here, and we're just going to put one screw in the middle of it. You're like, "Why are you doing that?" Trust me, you'll [music] get it. Then we're gonna get a little bit more drywall screws and have them on standby. We're gonna feed this through. While we're holding the screw in one hand, we're going to put a couple of screws all the way around securing the scrap piece in place. I shouldn't have used oak for a scrap piece. [laughter] It's really tight. Trial number two. You want to go slow with this section because these screws have to be just below the paper. [music] Don't let it puncture the paper or else it won't be as strong. Next up, grab a scrap piece of drywall and cut this exact shape out close as you can get. Maybe it's also a good time to show you how to cut drywall really easily. Grab yourself the top of the face. This is the back. Put a straight edge down. Use a utility knife and just create a quick little scorch. Then snap it in half. Flip it over. Cut the backing off. Get yourself a perfect piece. That's way too damn small. Oh, [music] wrong piece. Perfect. Secure your piece to your backing piece. this piece of oak. Don't use oak as your backing piece. It's a very dense wood. Use any kind of pine or MDF. I really hope you guys are enjoying these bloopers cuz I look like a damn fool right now. But hey, we're learning something together. Now, we get our drywall mud and tape. Start spreading it along all the seams with a little bit of excess. You don't want to catch yourself in a situation where the tape, any part of the tape is not having any mud on it. So, go more than less. Let's put it that way. Put it right over in the middle of the seam. Run it flat. All right. At this point, we should have all of the seams taped up, a new piece of drywall on. Now comes the fun part. blend everything. Anytime you're blending these things, you want to make sure your tape is completely covered. Either like that or worst case scenario, just slightly translucent, but the more you get it covered, the more room you have to sand and get a better finish without having another application. Boom. Just like that, we got our patch done. What are we scoring it? 74. Reason why there's a lot of steps that go into this that somebody might definitely feel intimidated on. You got to cut the whole square. You got to match the piece to go in there. You got to do all this taping and blending. The blending, you got to do a lot of it in order to not to see this hump when natural light hits it. But once it's dry, get it sanded, put the texture that's on your walls, you should be good to go. Before we move on to number four, let me wash this real quick. In the meantime, let me show you something really cool I just got for the house. All right, check this out. This is not just a regular iPad or anything like that. This is the Yui expert secure system and I just got it for my entire house. Look how cool this is. This is my shop. This is where we're just working. We can click on it. We can pan anywhere we want on this. Move the camera around, right? It's powered with AI in it, right? So, I can do like recognition instead of me searching through endless footage. I can find everything. So, there is the Solo Cam S320. The reason I went with it there is because there's no hard wiring. It has its own solar panel that's charging and directing the signal straight into my house. No running crazy wires. 360 view, no blind spots. I also have an indoor cam that again, it just gets plugged into an outlet right behind here. I decided to put on my patio here just so I can watch before any of the kids get close to the pool or start messing with things that they tell me they didn't do. And look, as soon as I stepped onto here, it pulled it up right away and voice that somebody is in front of that camera. Instant notification. I also have the video doorbell that's hooked up to my entire secure system. That way, it sends a notification straight to my smart display way before I even need to get to the front door to look. It'll notify me there's somebody at the front door. I could see who it is and make a decision from there whether or not I need to go answer it or not. But that's not all. It has an entryway alarm, a motion sensor alarm. They also have a smoke alarm, a flood and freeze alarm, and a key fob. My phone's blowing up with notification. Oh, somebody's calling. Hello. >> Oh, UV Security just called me about alarm going on in my house. That's crazy. It's an actual phone number. Look, there's zero wires. There's zero installation required. It's literally open, plug, and play. And it all goes to the professional Homebase S1. It has a 24-hour battery backup, so you don't have to worry about power loss. It has 32 GB of built-in storage. It has real 24/7 monitoring. It has a keypad that you can arm disarm quickly. Has an SOS panic button and a covert duress alarm if you're trying to play it cool. Here's how I use it on a very daily practical application that makes my life so much easier. My kids are constantly in and out of the house and I don't know which windows and doors are open. I'll get notifications whether on my smart display, on my phone, or through my app to know exactly what the situation is. When I leave out of town and if we forgot to turn off the stove or maybe there is a door open or somebody broke in, I will get a live call from a real person to tell me what's going on. Not only that, but the expert secure will send video footage to the police dispatch to prioritize your call. Now, that's when things do go wrong. But on the days that things do go right, I love the fact that when we're making dinner in the kitchen, we could see somebody on the doorbell. We don't have to leave the kitchen. We'll see if that's just an Amazon package being dropped off or maybe it's another solicitor. And if something does go wrong, I'm able to log in through my app or my video display and look up through their AI recognition to detect any kind of person around a particular time to display. It also recognizes family members, so you can distinguish between somebody that you know and somebody you don't know. The Expert Secure 247 monitoring is available in 34 other states. U currently running an incredible offer for the Expert Secure system. Click the link in description. They have a deal running through October 31st, so you don't want to miss out. So protect yourself, protect your loved ones. Click the link in description. Check out the Yui Expert Secure E10 system. It is one of my favorite systems I've come across so far. Now, let's get back into this video. Let's go. We got our third patch. We're moving on to our fourth. So, this one is similar to the first one, except you're skipping a few steps, but you have to earn them somewhere. You have the same hole size roughly, and then you cut out a scrap piece, obviously, after cleaning it up, just about an inch to inch and a half larger than your hole. And this is where it gets complicated. You then flip your drywall piece over. It helps if you have a straight edge like this. And what we're going to do is create this silhouette of this hole squared out of the middle of this patch while creating the flaps around it. It sounds weird, but you'll get it when we get to it. This is probably the easiest way I learned to do it is if you just draw it out first. Perfect. Then we're going to take our utility knife and we're just going to start scorching here. I know it's on the backside. It looks weird, but trust me, you'll get it. When I first saw this, I thought like the person that invented is probably also the person that invented origami. So, now that we got this done, just how silly it is. We got it done. We're going to gently pry our sections open and gently peel off the drywall section while keeping the tape, the front tape on. Key word on gently. Thank god that worked. This would have been embarrassing if all of this started tearing them off. [snorts] All right, clean that up a little bit more. We should be fine. Do our test fit. Start lathering on just the outsides of our frame here. In the words of Bob Ross, happy trees. But in our situation, happy mud. Beautiful mud. Happy mud. All we do is simply get it in place. Make sure it's flat. Perfect. Push our wings, if you will, onto it. And then just like regular drywall tape, spread it out. Now, I love this method. I think it's somewhat fun to actually do just cuz my OCDness allows for my brain to have a dopamine response from this. I go, that looks clean. That looks pretty. It's better than a hodge podge of tape all over. There's less overlapping, so you don't have double-sided tape basically stacked on one another, creating a larger barrier. You don't have to blend this as much as this one. I mean, already it's looking so much nicer. I think this might be the nicest California patch I've ever made. That is just gorgeous. You You know you're an adult when you're appreciating a good drywall patch. What are we going to grade this in terms of difficulty? This one is a 71. I was going to give this one on the DIY scale a 68, but how easy and convenient it is. So, if you like crafty kind of stuff, do this. So, that's a hard one. Not a 6 to8. I'll I'll give it a I'll give it a seven. It earns a seven. It's It's baller, dude. It saves you so many steps. As long as you're precise with your cutting, that's that's final answer. Seven. We've covered four drywall repairs so far. We're moving on to number five. Now, remember, after this, I'm going to show you if you're in a situation where drywall is beyond patchwork, I'm going to show you exactly how to repair it. But, let's tackle this. I don't know what this method is called. I saw it not too long ago on those fine homebuilder uh magazines and it looks awesome. It had the potential of being probably one of the strongest patches, but I don't know. I've never tried it. So, we're going to try it together. Fair warning, this one's a little unorthodox. It caught me by surprise, but maybe you know it. So, here's what they're starting with. We are going to put drywall mud here, here, here, and here. Then, we're going to create a bridge. Should have brought [music] scissors. There we go. This is kooky already. God,…