How to Repair a large Drywall Hole
Hi I am Mark Donovan from HomeAdditionPlus.com and today, I am going to show you how to repair a large drywall hole.
So the first thing we are going to do is we are going to cut back around this drywall hole to approximately 1 foot high and backed above the studs, which is approximately 16 inches on the center here.
So the first thing I have done is I put my hand in the hole so I know where the stud basically is lying and draw a line approximately in line with the edge of that stud. And then I went up, in this case 16 inches and approximately over 16 inches here. I am going to cut this out with the drywall knife or a carpenter’s knife to approximate the opening.
Now what I have done here is I am taking a square and put it over my line, and using a carpenter’s knife score the drywall on all three sides in this case. And once I am done scoring it, I just continue to work my carpenter’s knife across the cut and all the way through the drywall. This takes a little bit of time. You got to go carefully and by all means, be careful you do not cut yourself. You might want to wear work gloves as well to prevent the risk of getting injured or cut by the knife.
Now that we have cut out around the edges of the hole, we can simply just remove the piece of drywall. We can now see that we are perfectly lined up on this side in putting the replacement one, and over here we need to cut back a little bit further. You also notice in this particular case that this drywall is 5/8 inch thick as we are working in a garage with a finished upstairs. If you are building a home or have a room that is either in the basement that is finished or in a garage, a lot of times you are going to be required by code to use 5/8 inch drywall.
So now that we know this is 5/8, we are going to have to make sure we buy 5/8 inch drywall for filling in this hole.
Now that we cut our initial opening, what we need to do is trim back a little bit more such that we reveal about half of the wall stud so we can apply our new piece of drywall into this spot. So what I have done is I have taken my measuring tape, slid it back in here and measured the depth to the stud, which is 1 ¼. I am going to allow another ½ inch further to allow that stud to be exposed. So I got approximately 1 ¾ inch that I have drawn a line back from this existing line or cut such that we can reveal that stud.
Again, using a level here, we are going to score the drywall along the line we made and I will continue to work this line such that we can remove this small section of drywall. I want to bring up a couple of points.
Number one, you will notice there is a plastic here. This is a vapor barrier. So when we cut, the drywall, we should really try to tape off with some duct tape of some sort just to seal the cuts so that we continue to maintain the vapor barrier between the dry wall and the insulation.
Second of all, we could have used possibly a saw here, a drywall saw. But again, if you are concerned about electrical wires, which you should be, and in addition, you would have to also at some point use a carpenter’s knife to cut back on the studs. In my situation, I felt it was preferred to use a drywall knife or a carpenter’s knife versus using a drywall saw. It is your choice. I think if you go carefully in scoring off with the carpenter’s knife, you will do it in a descent job, the more safer job and we will reduce the risk of potentially cutting any wires that could be seen back behind the wall
So now, what we are doing is we have measured the opening of the hole we cut, mark it out on the new piece of drywall. I find the best thing to do is basically again taking the carpenter’s knife and score the whole length, in this case, this piece of drywall so it will make it easier to cut, to get a cleaner cut if you just go the whole length. What you can do is after you scored it, simply break a line in the back line, take your carpenter’s knife and cut through that side and you get a nice, clean cut as you can see here. Now we will do the same thing to go over on th
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