The Situation
Tim called us from his Palo Alto home in a state of frustration. He'd hired a general handyman to repair drywall after a plumbing leak, and the contractor had done the initial patch but never came back to finish — the compound was still rough, the texture was wrong, and one section of the repair was visibly sunken.
This is a situation we encounter more often than we'd like. Half-finished repairs are often harder to fix than starting fresh, because you have to work around what's already there while correcting its shortcomings.
The Assessment
We inspected the three repair areas: the main water-damaged section in the hallway (a roughly 2×4 foot patch), a smaller repair near the ceiling (where water had tracked along a joist), and a cosmetic repair in the adjacent bedroom where the previous contractor had apparently bumped the wall moving equipment.
The hallway patch had been done with insufficient compound coverage — there were high spots and a hollow area that moved when pressed. The ceiling repair had been textured with the wrong product and was visibly mismatched. The bedroom repair was actually fine; it just needed final sanding and primer.
The Fix
We skim-coated the entire hallway patch, built up the sunken area with fresh compound in stages, and re-textured to match the surrounding knockdown finish. The ceiling repair required removing the incorrect texture and starting fresh. Two days of work, two coats of compound, matched texture on all three areas.
Tim walked through with us when the work was complete. "I can't tell where the repairs are," he said. That's exactly what we aim for.