Repair or replace
Does this get patched or replaced?
Five questions: what is wrong, how big, where it is, whether the cause is fixed, and what texture is on it. Out comes one of five answers, with every rule that produced it printed underneath, so you can argue with it instead of just believing it.
It includes the part most contractors leave off their website: when you do not need us. A water stain on hard board with the leak already fixed is a paint problem. A handful of nail pops in the first year is normal and has a ten-minute fix. We say so because it is true.
What is wrong?
What this looks like
Answer the questions and the verdict lands here, with every rule that produced it printed underneath. Nothing is sent anywhere — it runs in your browser.
When to just call somebody
Plenty of drywall damage is genuinely a homeowner job and we will say so. These are the ones where it stops being one:
- You do not know what caused it, or it is still happening.
- It is a popcorn ceiling and there is no lab result.
- It is a ceiling at all — the work is over your head and the standard is higher.
- It is a rated assembly, a shaft or a demising wall, where the repair is a specification.
- The plane takes raking light, or the paint is deep-tone or has any sheen.
- The texture is a hand texture and you have already tried to match it once.
- You would have to cut near electrical, plumbing, or something you cannot identify.
- The area is bigger than you can reach comfortably standing on the floor.
This tool reasons from general rules. It has not seen your wall, it does not know what is behind it, and it is not a substitute for somebody standing in the room. Where it says stop, it means stop.
The five answers
What can come out, and what each one means
Do it yourself
A genuine homeowner job. We tell you which part catches people, and why paying somebody to drive out for it would be paying for a truck rather than a skill.
A proper patch
Cut square, backed, taped with paper and coated out much wider than the damage. A real repair with a real sequence.
Replace the section
Cut back to solid board and to framing, put new board in, back-block the joints that miss a member, tape and coat it out.
The whole plane
One wall corner to corner, or one ceiling wall to wall. The unit your eye compares against is the unit to finish.
Stop
An active leak, a popcorn ceiling with no lab result, truss uplift, or a rated assembly. Something has to happen before any drywall work.
The three questions that actually decide it
The first is whether the cause is fixed. Almost all drywall damage is a symptom of something else: a leak, a board that was specified wrong, framing that moves, a control joint that was never installed. Repairing the symptom before the cause is handled means paying for the repair twice, because the second time you also have to undo the first one.
The second is what the light is going to do to it. A repair under raking light — from a big slider, from surface-mounted fixtures six inches off the wall, from a stairwell clerestory — is being judged by a standard the rest of that wall never had to meet. No wall is perfectly flat, and light casting across the surface at just the right angle will make a good wall look bad. There, the answer is almost always the whole plane.
The third is what texture is on it. Orange peel is the easy end: a skilled finisher can normally make a patch disappear after paint. Hand textures carry the signature of the hand that applied them, and two applicators produce visibly different walls. Popcorn cannot be genuinely patched at all. That difference is what decides whether you are talking about a patch or a plane.
And the fourth, which is not a question
You are going to repaint the wall corner to corner. A wall is a single visual surface and paint does not spot-repair: the existing paint has faded, yellowed and burnished from cleaning, and the repaired area has different porosity, so it takes paint at a different sheen even in the same colour from the same can. Touching up in the middle of a wall leaves a halo. We would rather tell you that up front and have you budget for it than hand you a technically finished repair you can see from the doorway.
A patch in a hallway is a real job
And it gets the same sequence as a whole house, just compressed. Send us a photo and we will tell you what we see, even when the answer is that you can do it yourself.