Drywall Repair

Drywall repair is graded by size. Nail pops and small dings get compound and sanding. Anything wider than a few inches needs backing behind it — a piece of scrap board fastened inside the cavity — so the patch has something solid to sit on. A patch floated over open air will crack the first time the wall takes a bump.

Compound goes on in coats, not all at once. Each coat is thinner and wider than the last, and each has to dry before the next. In Florida humidity that dry time runs longer than the bag says, and rushing it is what causes shrinkage cracks to show up a week later.

“A patch that is perfectly flat and smooth in a knockdown ceiling stands out worse than the hole did. Matching the texture is most of the job.”

Texture is where most patches give themselves away. Knockdown is the most common ceiling and wall texture in this area, with orange peel close behind. Both are sprayed and then worked, and matching an existing pattern takes test passes on a scrap board before anything goes on your ceiling. A dead-flat patch in a knockdown ceiling is more obvious than the damage was.

Water damage gets one question first: where did the water come from. A brown ring on a ceiling is a symptom. In Florida the usual culprits are a clogged air conditioner condensate line, a roof leak, or a supply line in the attic. Patching before the source is fixed means doing it twice, so we would rather find it first.

Once the area is dry, water stains need a stain-blocking primer — shellac or oil based. Latex primer alone will not hold back tannins and the stain will ghost through the finish coat within weeks.

We can finish to primer and leave painting to you, or paint the repair to match. Matching into an existing wall color usually means painting corner to corner rather than spot painting, because even the correct color will flash differently over fresh compound.