Almost every drywall repair is one of five things, and which one you have decides whether it is an hour with a knife or a morning with a saw. Knowing which is which before you call anybody is worth doing, because it is also what separates a fair price from a guess.

Need it done? Send a photograph and we will tell you what it is. Somebody comes out, looks, and you get a fixed price in writing before anything starts. Book a free quote or call 517-505-7135.

The five kinds of damage

A nail pop or a screw head. A fastener has backed out and pushed a small dome of compound off the wall. The board is fine. The fix is to drive a new screw a couple of inches away, pull the old one or set it below the surface, and fill both.

A dent or a small hole — doorknob, chair back, a foot through a hallway wall. Anything up to about the size of a fist is filled and feathered or, if the paper is torn right through, cut back to a clean square and patched with a backing piece. Torn paper matters more than size. Compound over torn paper cracks again within a year.

A cracked joint. A line running along a seam or up from the corner of a door opening. This is almost never a filling job — the tape underneath has failed or the house has moved, and filling the crack just gives it a smoother route back. The tape comes out, new tape goes in, and the joint is rebuilt in three coats.

A hole big enough to need board. Past about six inches you are no longer patching, you are replacing a section: cut back to the studs, screw in new board, tape the four new joints, three coats, sand.

Water damage. Different animal entirely, and the first question is not the wall — it is whether whatever wet it has stopped. We wrote about that one separately in repair or replace on water-damaged drywall.

The honest part: when a patch is going to show

Most of the trade promises an invisible repair. Here is where that is not true, and you deserve to know before rather than after.

In raking light. A patch can be genuinely invisible under a ceiling light and perfectly obvious at four in the afternoon when low sun crosses the wall. Filler and the original board are different materials of different ages, and a shallow plane change that nobody can see head-on throws a shadow when the light comes in flat. A wall with a window down one end is the hard case.

In gloss. The shinier the paint, the more it shows. Flat and matte hide a great deal. Eggshell shows some. Satin and semi-gloss, which is what most trim and a lot of kitchens and bathrooms are, show nearly everything.

Under somebody else's texture. If the wall is textured, matching it is a separate skill from fixing the hole and is the thing most likely to give the repair away. That one has its own page — texture matching.

In the paint, even when the patch is perfect. New compound takes paint differently from a wall that has been painted and sitting for ten years, and paint fades. Spot-painting a repair usually produces a patch-shaped patch in a slightly different shade. Expect to repaint wall to corner, not hole to edge.

None of this means a repair is not worth doing. It means the quote should tell you which of these applies to your wall, and ours does.

What moves the price

  • Which of the five it is. A nail pop and a cracked joint look similar and are not remotely the same job.
  • How many, and how far apart. Eight small repairs in one room is one visit. Eight across a house is a day of moving ladders and drop cloths.
  • Coats and drying. A proper repair is three coats with full drying between them, so it is several short visits rather than one long one. Anybody doing it in a single pass is doing something else.
  • Texture. A smooth wall is the easy case. Matching a texture adds a skill and a sample board.
  • Height and access. A stairwell wall or a ceiling over a stair is staging, and staging is time.
  • Paint. Not assumed, and worth deciding early, because it often costs more than the repair.

There is no rate card for any of it. A hole the same size can be a twenty-minute job or half a day depending on what is behind it.

Can you do it yourself?

A nail pop or a small dent, yes — and it is a good first job. The two that catch people out are the cracked joint, where filling instead of re-taping means it comes back, and the sanding, which is where an acceptable repair turns into a visible one. The trick almost nobody is told: put three thin coats on, each one wider than the last, and sand with a light held flat against the wall rather than straight at it.

Where this stops

A crack that keeps coming back in the same place, a door that will not latch any more, or cracks running diagonally from the corners of several openings are not drywall problems. They are movement, and filling them is treating the symptom. Where it looks like that, we will say so rather than sell you the same repair twice.

What we have actually done

Drywall is the second most-requested job in our enquiry book — 25 people have asked for it — and 17 drywall jobs sit on eleven months of invoices: property-manager turnovers and homeowner repairs across Lansing, East Lansing, Okemos, Haslett and Holt. It is ordinary work here and it is done most weeks.

Book it

Send a photograph of the damage and one of the wall it sits in, and say roughly how big it is. That is usually enough to tell you which of the five it is and whether it is going to show.

Book a free quote · call 517-505-7135 · or read more about drywall repair.

Serving Lansing, East Lansing, Okemos, Haslett, Holt and the rest of Greater Lansing.