How-To: Fix a hole in a hollow core door
How to fix a hole in a door?? How many times has this happened to you? With 4 kids running around, slamming doors and leaving stuff everywhere, it’s happened to us more than a few times. Hollow core doors are notorious for being easily damaged, but they are a huge cost saver over a solid door, and thankfully they can be repaired easily and still look like new.
I have mastered repairing these hollow core doors with this simple technique
Quick and Easy Hollow Core Door Hole Repair Hack
Door Repair Materials:
- Great Stuff Expanding Foam
- DAP – Plaster of Paris (or any drywall compound, joint compound, or patch repair filler)
For this repair, I used Great Stuff Expanding Foam, and Plaster of Paris.
I had a box of Plaster of Paris already so this is what I used, but any drywall compound will work. I prefer mixing mine so I use powder and water. Pre-mixed compounds will work just as well. Bob Vila recommends using auto body filler, which dries very hard, but is also hard to sand.
Step 1 – Fill the hole with Expanding Foam
To fix a hole in a door; once you’ve got your spray foam can all shaken up and ready to go, fill the hole with expanding foam. It expands 2-3x the original size after a few seconds, so start small.
Once you’ve got enough foam in the hole, your door should look something like this.
Let the expanding foam cure, then use a knife or razor blade to cut the foam back to just below the wood surface of the door.
Step 2 – Fill with drywall compound/plaster
Next,
After cutting back the expanding foam, mix (or apply premixed) drywall compound or plaster over the hole. Feather it out beyond the edges of the hole so its easy to blend the repair in with the final finish.
Plaster dries in about 20-30min. Once its dry enough to sand, lightly go over the surface with 220 grit sandpaper or a fine sanding block.
It should look like the picture below when its finished
Step 3 – Paint over the repair
Lastly, time to paint. Paint over the drywall compound with a thin layer of primer, then paint. I used a paint and primer mix as we had some left over from a previous job.
There you have it, you cant even tell there was ever a hole here.
*Note – I moved the door stop to the bottom hinge where the door was undamaged to reduce the risk of ruining my repair job.
*Tip – If the hole is too big for this method, you can slide a thin piece of wood or stiff cardboard into the hole and allow the expanding foam to hold it into position. This works better if you can glue or tape something onto the wood patch to hold it in place while the foam expands and cures.
Here is a post from HomeServe that basically describes the same process (without my awesome pics). They recommend cardboard for larger holes too
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Whats the fastest way to fix a hole in a door?
Using expanding foam and something to act as a backing board is a quick and reliable repair method. View our How-To here.
How do you repair a hole in a hollow core door?
Filling the hollow part of the door with expanding foam is an easy and quick way to patch a hole in a hollow core door. View our How-To here.
How do I fill a hole in a wooden door?
Filling a hole in a solid door can be done with wood filler. Here is a great article on repairing solid doors using filler
How much does it cost to fix a hole in a door?
Fixing a hollow or solid door isn’t expensive. In our example here, it cost us around $8 for expanding foam. Materials like sandpaper, dry wall or patch filler and paint are also required, but cost very little.
