Hole in the wall repair

Somebody leaned on the towel ring and loosened it's hold on the wall, so I set about fixing it. It's just screwed to the drywall, so it's not the most secure mounting in the first place, but this seems to be the standard for towel racks in modern America. As long as you don't hang on it, it's fine. If you have small kids, well forget it, you're gonna have holes in your walls.

Seems this is the second time it's been repaired as there are four screw anchors in the wall here, so the whole area has disintegrated. The first thing I need is some kind of backstop behind the hole to support my patch. The hole is small and I really don't want to make it any bigger, so I come up with a tedious solution. I take a bit of wood about six inches long, drill four holes in it about an inch apart and then thread screws into the holes and then pull them back out so I can put the screws in by hand. Now I put a long screw in the first hole near the end, then using the screw as a handle slide the stick into the hole and then pull it up flat against the back side of the drywall. Now comes the tricky bit. Hold onto the handle screw (if you lose your grip, you will lose the stick to the wall monster) and slide it all the way to one side so the second hole is visible. Put a second screw in that hole and pull the first screw out. Repeat until the handle screw is in the last hole (which should be in the center of the board), and put two screws through the drywall into the stick, one on each end. Voila! Le steek du backup, she ees in place!

Now we can carry on with our usual patch and paint procedures. The wood putty was not very stiff and wanted to flow out of the hole, so I made a dam out of scotch tape. That worked okay for the front, but evidently some ran out of the back because the top of the putty sagged inward. I used the putty instead of the spackle, because the spackle I've got (Fast & Final) is like made of fluff. It has no mass, and I suspect it has no strength. It was also old and dry and crumbly, so I took some of the crumbs and put them in a bowl with a few drops of water and mixed it up, using my fingers as a pestle. Seemed to work okay. The stuff is like concrete, a little water goes a long way. I put a teaspoon of water in the first batch and it turned to slush and I had to throw it out.

A note about wood putty: A couple of years ago I repaired the door latch on Ross's apartment in Eugene with wood putty. We stopped by recently and I checked out this repair. It was still holding and it was still solid. Neither the screws or the latch plate had worked loose. I am amazed.