PATCHING DRYWALL CRACKS

Al Carrell: Almost any home you go into, you're going to find cracks in the walls. Usually they're going to be up over the door, around the window, places like that. Now this doesn't mean that your house is about to fall down around your ears. But the cracks are unsightly and you ought to take care of them or they may grow.

Now if you take a little hairline crack like this, probably the thing that most people will do is get some stuff called spackling compound and a putty knife and they'll go to work on these cracks and just rub that stuff until it goes into the crack and fills it.

Now you're going to have to paint afterwards, and you're going to have to wait until the spackling compound dries before you're able to paint. There's an easier way to do all this though, and that is if you get something that's called a plaster pencil. It's like a big, fat crayon, only it's made out of something that looks like the sheetrock. And then you just start rubbing that in there and you'll get the stuff in the crack and then you can come back and paint immediately.

Now there are lots of other things that you can do when you have wider cracks, and we'll cover that sometime soon.

Episode 40 1996 - 97 Season

| Sponge Painting | Fixing Screeching Faucet | Painting Tips | Patching Drywall Cracks | Tromp L'eoil Windows | Handyman Hands | Bankruptcy |

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