DIY a Stay at Home Dad can do-repairing wall dings

Guys, dads, men: have you ever gotten the wrong kind of milk?  Your other half needs skim milk that usually has the red top, unless you go to a different store, which will have another color.   Sometimes you’ll reach in the area where the red topped skim milk should be, but somebody else had put a pink topped no fat milk there instead.

Either of these situations can happen and it’s not your fault, you just weren’t paying attention.  How does this milk parable parlay into a DIY project that is very basic?

Wall dings or small holes can be easily patched with spackling.  Just spread it on the surface, let it dry, sand it down, prime and paint it.  While it takes a little practice to make the surface appear smooth with no lines once it’s painted, it’s an easy project

This is the container for Spackling; note that it’s clearly labeled Spackling, easy to sand, yada yada.

 

 

This is the container for Stucco.  Stucco is not easy to sand or apply.  It’s what you’ll apply to your house, if you have stucco exterior.  As an exterior surface, it’s strong and quite resistant to the elements.

We had a room full of dings and holes on some walls that were being repaired.  About a quarter of the way through this job I realized that it’s taking much longer than usual and is not going on smoothly.  I stopped and saw that I was spreading stucco on the drywall.

Grrrrr…..Daddy Mojo knows the difference and had just purchased the container a couple days ago; either it was in the wrong section or I just wasn’t paying attention.  Either way, I had about 10 square feet of dried stucco that had to be sanded down.

Sanding stucco is like sanding concrete.  It rips through the coarsest sandpaper very quickly.  This meant that another package of 60 grit sandpaper had to be purchased in order to get the sandy surface of stucco down to something manageable.  Once it was manageable then I put spackling on it to make it smooth-and very, very strong.

The Bottom Line

Repairing wall dings and holes is easy work.  Don’t let the ease of the work lull you into doing the job with your eyes closed.    This little stucco debacle turned what should’ve been a simple spackle job into a two day ordeal.

 

As a stay at home dad I miss having the spare time to fix things. Even though the child is my full time job, things still break or need a fix in the house. Sometimes the repair will be something that I easily complete and other times it’s a repair that I simply should’ve paid to have it done. Regardless, I’ll write it up here in hopes that you may be able to gauge what you can do and when you need to call in for help. The series is called, DIY a Stay at Home Dad Can Do, but in some cases, you shouldn’t, because of difficulty, time involved or money. All dads aren’t equal. If you read English and take your time in purchasing products at Lowe’s or Home Depot bypass this post and go straight to the fart jokes, which should be in the next column.