Spent 6 hours patching drywall in my garage, still looks like a disaster

I decided to fix the holes in my garage drywall from previous shelves. Thought it would be a quick 2 hour job tops. After 6 hours of mudding, sanding, and re-mudding, the texture is still all wrong. The old paint is peeling around the patches too. Has anyone actually made garage drywall repairs look seamless without hiring a pro?

3 comments

3 Comments

baker.holly24d ago

Oh wow, six hours? That's brutal! I had a similar thing happen in my laundry room and I nearly threw my trowel through the drywall. The worst part is when the old paint starts peeling around the edges, that just makes everything look ten times worse no matter how smooth the patch is. I think the trick is you gotta scrape back all the loose paint way further than you think, like a good six inches around each patch, and then prime everything with a stain blocking primer before you even think about mudding again. But honestly, garage drywall has that rough texture that's almost impossible to match by hand, so sometimes you just gotta accept it's gonna look a little different and call it "character" or something. It's still super frustrating though, so I feel your pain.

drew_jones3123d ago

Six inches? Man that's way more than I would've thought. I would've stopped at like an inch and called it good.

jamie_adams22d ago

Six inches seems like a lot of overkill to me, honestly. I've patched garage drywall before and I just scraped back maybe an inch or two around the hole, slapped some mud on it, sanded, and moved on. Never had an issue with paint peeling back or anything. I get that @baker.holly had a rough time with her laundry room, but garages are totally different. They're not living spaces, so a little imperfection is basically invisible with the rough texture anyway. Feels like folks overthink this stuff sometimes, you know?