drywallhole-repair
We had an electrician come to do some work, and he had to move an outlet from one area to another, and do some other stuff on another portion of the wall. I'm left with a square outlet-shaped cut out in my dry wall, as well as another cut out that he filled and nailed together. How can I fix these?
This is a tall unit and if it were fully loaded, it could really hurt someone (especially a child) should it fall. Products like the 3M command strips are designed for hooks where the force on them is acting downwards. Your cabinet on the other hand, should it tip, would be pulling away from the wall and I really don't think those strips would hold. If it were my house and my kids, I would not trust them and would opt for a bracket.
As for glueing it, in all liklihood, it would just pull the paper layer of your drywall off with it. Even if it held, it would likely damage your walls more than a couple of holes for a bracket when it comes time to remove it.
For a solution to this, what I often see come with tall bookcases is a short strap (webbbing) with a screw and washer on both sides. One side screws into the back of the bookcase, and the other should be screwed into a drywall anchor - ideally a toggle bolt since they don't easily pull out. The washer is important to prevent the screw from pulling through the webbing. This particular one below uses velcro, but I'd personally screw it into the back of the bookcase.
(source: themanlyhousekeeper.com)
Alternatively a L bracket will work, but they tend to look ugly and depending how much clearance you have, can be really tight to install and/or remove.
Since the edges of the old paint/wallpaper are loose, you'll have to remove it back to where you get a tight edge. The main problem that you'll run into if you just try to scrape it is that you're likely to remove way to much before you get a suitable edge.
The best way that I've found to deal with paint blowouts like that is to score through the paint/wallpaper with a utility knife around the raised area, and then scrape up to your scoring. A putty knife or drywall knife works pretty well for this. This prevents you from raising more paint than you have to in order to get a decent looking repair, because the scoring will give a nice clean break in the paint.
When you have the area scraped with a clean edge, feather the edges with drywall compound and sand smooth. Since you're dealing with some sort of fiberboard instead of plaster, I'd also skim coat and sand the exposed area too (which you'll have to do anyway in order to fill the holes). After that, it should mostly disappear when re-painted.
Note that fiberboard can leech through paint pretty badly, so I'd hit it with a pretty good stain blocking primer.
Best Answer
The first repair is a piece of cake. Get some drywall tape and a bucket of joint compound and tape away. Rather than explain it here, just Google "taping drywall" and you'll get more information than I could ever provide.
The second one is little trickier because you'll have to support a square plug of drywall. You can get drywall clips from your home store just for this purpose. You can also get a strip on wood a few inches longer the hole and screw it into the inside portion of the hole from the outside. Then cut your plug and place it in the hole and secure it to your support with a few drywall screws, the tape like you did to the first one.
If you think you'll ever have to access the second hole for other electrical work, you can just mount a blank outlet cover over the hole.