I am not a frequent blogger. I'll keep this as short and sweet as possible.
I had stripped holes in the wall that needed to be fixed ASAP so I could get our baby gate back up at the bottom of the stairs. I didn't have a stud to secure into and the wall anchors were not strong enough/the stripped holes were too big to keep the gate in place. After doing some research I found a great video on wall repair from Lowes on YouTube. One video showed how to use furring strips and the other showed how to do a California patch. Here is the step by step of how I used both to create a "stud" to secure the gate into.
I had a piece of scrap wood that fit around my holes perfectly. I marked the location I needed to cut.
I used a combination of a utility knife (for initial cuts) and a small handheld saw blade.
I purchased a new sheet of 2'x2' drywall from Home Depot from the
lumber/drywall section. You should not have to but a full sheet of 4'x8'
unless you need it. It was pretty cheap. There are two sides to the drywall. The "front" and "back". The front will face you on the wall and the back looks like cardboard and will be inside the wall.
I traced my template piece on the new sheet of drywall and cut around the perimeter with the utility knife. I left about an inch on each side for attaching it to the wall.
After that, I cut off the excess drywall FROM THE BACK. You have to leave the front paper in tact so it can attach to the existing wall.
Peel away the drywall as best as possible without taking away too much from your new piece that goes in the wall.
Check the size and make sure it fits nice and snug but don't put it in all the way just yet!!
Next, I found a scrap piece of wood from another project we had in the garage. This is a scrap piece of 1/4" plywood. You can use a thicker piece of wood but this is just what I had. You want the wood to be longer than the hole that you cut so you can secure it to the wall.
I marked the wall where I wanted the screws to be to secure the wood in place and I also marked on the wood where the hole should be located. I wanted to make sure the piece didn't fall down too low so I could secure it properly.
Makes sure your hole is big enough so that you can hold your scrap piece of wood in place while you drill pilot holes. I drilled one pilot hole on the bottom, held the piece in place with one hand and used my other hand to feed the screw into the hole. Then I used a philips head screwdriver to get the screw into the pilot hole. Once it held the board in place, I put another pilot hole and screw in the top then secured it the rest of the way.
I put two screws in top and in bottom to hold it tight.
Next I used some all purpose joint compound (This is WAYYY different than spackling putty...) to prep the wall and fill the screw holes.
I pressed the new drywall on top of the wet joint compound and spread another layer on top to seal it into the wall.
Once it's done drying, I'll use my handy scrap piece of wood with some 220 grit sand paper to smooth it out to match the wall. If you have a textured wall, there are a ton of videos that show you how to redo the texture. Then I'll paint and reinstall the baby gate into my new stud!
Here are the wall anchors I was using. Waste of money...As you can see, the anchor on the left actually fell out of the white part and got lost in the wall. The holes in the drywall were so big because of the anchors and I didn't want to keep getting different anchors all the time...
Total project time ~ 30 minutes for hole repair (once I had all my supplies gathered)
Total project cost ~ $15-$25 depending on how much you have at home already
Difficult level ~ Easy!! (now that you have this awesome DIY blog to show you step by step!)
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