Drywall repair and patching in Los Angeles

The size of the hole drives the price, because it changes what has to happen behind it.

Nail and anchor holes. Filler, sand, spot-prime, paint. Minutes of work each. Almost nobody books a visit for one hole, so these get done in a batch. A whole apartment’s worth in one go.

A doorknob-sized hole. Anything up to roughly six inches needs backing behind it before it can be filled, usually a mesh patch or a small piece of board on cleats. Then two or three coats of compound, each one dried and sanded.

A large patch. Once you’re past about a foot, it takes a proper cut-and-replace. Square off the damage, fix the new piece to the studs, tape the seams, then feather the compound wide enough that the repair disappears. It’s a real skill. It’s also where a bad patch gives itself away, as a bulge you can see under raking light.

Water damage. Nobody should close up a wet wall. Find the leak, fix it, let the area dry out, and patch after that. If the staining is on a ceiling below a bathroom, expect a plumber in the mix.

Around half the housing in the City of LA predates 1960, and the county’s median home was built in 1965. In that older stock, what looks like drywall is often plaster over wood lath. Thicker, harder and deeper than drywall.

Plaster repair is a different job with different materials. Patch it with drywall compound alone and it tends to crack again within a year, because the plaster around it keeps moving. Done properly, new plaster gets keyed into the lath, or a drywall patch is set to the right depth so the finished surface sits flush with the plaster around it. Mention the age of the house when you get in touch. It changes the materials and the price.

Filling the hole is the easy half. Making the repair vanish is the hard half, and in California that means texture. Orange peel is everywhere. Knockdown is close behind, and older homes turn up skip trowel and hand-troweled plaster finishes.

We match texture by eye, with a spray gun or a knife. Get it slightly wrong and the repair reads as a patch from across the room, even after painting. We work it out on a test board first, and we show you that board before any compound goes on the wall.

Paint is the other half of the illusion. Even with the same paint code, a patch painted on its own often shows, because the wall around it has faded. Painting corner to corner is usually what makes it disappear.

Homes built before 1978 may have lead-based paint, and sanding or cutting into painted surfaces is what disturbs it. That’s a large share of LA’s housing. For work that disturbs painted surfaces in a pre-1978 home, the federal RRP rule requires a certified renovator using contained work practices once the job disturbs more than six square feet of painted surface in a room, or twenty outside. Tell us if your house is that old. Containment changes how the work area has to be set up, and it belongs in the estimate. Nobody wants it sprung on them on the day.

Small holes are one visit. Anything needing multiple coats of compound means two visits or a long single day, since each coat has to dry before the next one goes on. Water damage adds drying time and can’t be rushed.

California has a narrow exemption that lets some minor work be done without a CSLB contractor license. It’s Business and Professions Code section 7048, and there’s more to it than the price. All of this has to be true. The job is casual, minor or inconsequential. The total for labor, materials and everything else comes to less than $1,000. No building permit is needed. And the job hasn’t been split into smaller contracts to stay under that number. It also can’t be one piece of a larger project. On top of that, the exemption doesn’t cover anyone who advertises in a way that might suggest to the public they’re a contractor, or who brings in another person to do the work or help with it. So there’s no clean price line to point at. A single patch often lands under $1,000, but the price on its own doesn’t settle it. A whole-room repair, or anything following a leak, usually won’t qualify, and we’ll put a licensed contractor on those.

Send the whole list if you have one. A hole in the hallway, a row of anchor holes where a shelf used to be, a corner bead someone caught with a vacuum. Drywall work is priced around the visit far more than the patch, so the second and third repairs on the same trip cost a fraction of the first.