Averting Disaster: How to Fix a Hole in Your Wall

 One of the last room’s in the house to decorate is the guest room upstairs.  This guest room will serve a dual purpose as a library since we needed a home for our remaining bookcases.  Further on down the road, this will be our first child’s room.   However, our plans for this room were interrupted by a small repair issue earlier this year.  Our rambunctious nieces and nephews got into some type of wrestling match and knocked a hole in the wall!  One of the children fell into the wall precisely between two beams, which is the weakest part of the wall.  Fortunately, my father can fix anything.  Here are some step by step instructions to fix a dent or a hole in your wall.  

If you are working with a dent instead of a hole, you will have a little bit easier of time.  Fortunately, there was not a hole completely through the plaster in our wall.  The key to making the wall look brand new again is to put in thin layers of plaster over a period of time.  Plaster over the dent using a knife to one eighth of an inch in thickness and allow 24 hours to dry.  To maintain a smooth surface, lightly sand in between coats of plaster.  Repeat this procedure until your dent is almost completely filled in.  We needed three coats of normal plaster before the next step.

At this point, you will need to reinforce the wall with seam tape.  This tape is elastic and will prevent the wall from cracking due to seasonal temperature changes.  For your final plaster layer, you should use finish plaster, which has a nicer look.  After the finish plaster has dried, match your paint color and paint over the plaster.  Jess wasn’t really excited about buying more yellow paint, so we decided to repaint the entire room to a soft green this week instead of matching the paint.

If you have a hole that has gone all the way through the plaster layer in your wall, you will need to reinforce the hole before any plastering can begin.  Using drywall screws, attach backer board to the beam supports closest to your hole.  This will protect the integrity of the wall if you are dealing with a major hole.  Then follow the procedures for plastering a dent.  If you have sanded the finish plaster properly, you won’t even see a difference where the hole used to be.

With our dent fixed & our wall painted, Jess is ready to start hanging up paintings and decorations for an Alice in Wonderland themed room.   

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