How to Spackle Interior Walls

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Grady Johnson and I'm a professional painter. And today I represent expertvillage.com. Okay now, we're to the preparation part of spackling. When you spackle you do want to have yourself a good flex blade. It's a little different from a normal putty knife. It's the only time you need another blade. But this will make it a little easier to work the spackling. Now, you can work it with a straight blade if that's all you've got. If all you have is a stiff blade, it will work. But you'll be able to get better action out of the flex blade. Now, what I do usually once I've removed all the pictures from the wall and I'm ready to go ahead and do my spackling, whether that hole is for an existing picture or one that's going to go up later, I go ahead and spackle it. They can always put another, another hanger in there if they need it. But if they left the hanger on the wall, okay, then I'll go ahead and leave that. Then, just paint around that. But generally, we're going to want to remove the hangers, you know or the nails that are on the wall. Then spackle over those little holes. So you're going to go ahead and bring up the edge of your top there. Take that off and get a little of that lightweight spackling on your, on your flex blade and you're going to use your flex blade because it's going to give a little bit. Now, the first thing to do is just get something on here. Get them up in there. Lay that stuff on there. Just get it on all of them a little bit. You can see with this flex blade, you can work it a little bit because it gives. Now, once you've got the stuff on there, get the excess off your knife and just run that off. You can see that evens it on out. By doing this, you give a nice even look to the wall. Now, when we roll over that it's going to completely disappear like there was never a hole in there. Now if you run across a larger hole, something that's over a quarter inch or so, a good little painter's tip is to stick some newspaper up behind it and then go ahead and lay your spackling in over that. Now, when the holes get big like that, it's a little different. For that you want to lay the spackling up real heavy on top so that it kind of bows out a little. Then when that all drys out good and solid, sand that off flat and you should have no problem. Just be sure any newspaper or any object that you cram in behind that is below the surface of the hole and when you put that on there, you should be able to flatten that out even. You can do the same thing on the ceiling holes too, whenever you have those little hooks and stuff. Bow those out a little bit too and then it can handle a little larger hole. Now, that's all you're going to need to know about spackling and if you take these basic steps, you'll know how to spackle your walls and have a beautiful paint job."