How do I stop the door handle punching a hole in the wall?

A door handle striking plasterboard concentrates a lot of force on a small area of gypsum with paper on the front. It punches through, and once through it takes a piece of the core with it, so the hole is always bigger behind than it looks from the front. The repair fails when it is treated as a filling job, because there is nothing behind the filler.

What you'll need

• Door stop — floor, skirting or hinge pin type
• Plasterboard offcut, or a self-adhesive repair patch
• Filling knife and jointing compound or fine filler
• Sanding block and primer
• A short length of timber batten (optional)

Step by step

1. Fit the stop first.If you repair the wall and then wait to see whether it happens again, it happens again. Ten minutes and a stop is the whole prevention.
2. Choose the type of stop by the situation.A floor-mounted stop is the most robust but is a trip hazard and complicates cleaning. A skirting-mounted stop is unobtrusive and effective if the skirting is fixed properly. A hinge-pin stop takes the load at the hinge and needs no wall or floor fixing. A self-adhesive wall buffer is the least intrusive and the least durable.
3. Cut the damaged hole back to a clean shape.Square or rectangular, with a knife, back to board that is intact rather than crumbling. A ragged crater cannot be patched; a clean square can.
4. Get something solid behind the hole.Either a self-adhesive mesh repair patch for a small hole, or, for anything bigger than about 50mm, a piece of timber batten slid in behind the board and screwed through from the front at each end, so a plasterboard offcut can be screwed to it.
5. Fit the plasterboard patch flush.Cut an offcut to the hole, screw it to the batten, and check it sits level with the surrounding board face rather than proud.
6. Tape the joints and fill in thin coats.Scrim or paper tape over every edge of the patch, then jointing compound in two or three thin coats, each one wider than the last, feathered well out. Thick single coats crack and shrink.
7. Sand, prime and paint.Sand flat with a block rather than by hand, prime the repair — bare compound is far more absorbent than the wall around it — then paint the whole wall or at least the whole panel, because a patch of paint in the middle of a wall shows.
8. If it is a stud wall and the handle keeps hitting the same place, add a noggin.Where a wall repeatedly takes impact in the same spot, a horizontal noggin between the studs behind the board turns the whole area into something solid, and a stop screwed into it will never pull out.

Common mistakes

• Filling the hole without backing it — Filler needs something to bear on. Pushed into a hole with a void behind it, it drops back, cracks and falls out — and it is not remotely strong enough to take another impact.
• Sticking a buffer over the damaged area — The buffer transfers the load to a wall that has already failed there. It needs to land on sound board, or the fixing needs to be into a stud.
• Screwing a stop into plasterboard alone — A door stop takes a sharp horizontal impact repeatedly. Into board alone it works loose within months. It needs a stud, a noggin, the floor, or the skirting.

Alternatives

• Floor-mounted door stop: Screwed into the floor where the door edge lands. The most robust and the least likely to fail, at the cost of a fixing in the floor and something to catch a toe or a vacuum on.
• Skirting-mounted stop: Screwed into the skirting board so the door meets it before the handle meets the wall. Tidy and effective, provided the skirting is firmly fixed — a stop on loose skirting simply pulls it off.
• Hinge-pin stop: Clamps to the hinge knuckles and limits the swing. Needs no fixing into wall or floor at all, which makes it the sensible answer in a rented property, and it is adjustable.
• Self-adhesive wall buffer: A rubber dome stuck where the handle lands. Cheap, invisible, removable — and it spreads the impact rather than stopping it, so on a wall that is already damaged it delays rather than prevents.
• Magnetic catch stop: Holds the door open against the wall as well as stopping it. Useful where a door is regularly held open, but it needs a firm fixing on both sides.

Questions people ask