Walls and Ceilings - suggestions to improve seriously butchered sheetrock

Aloha,
I am looking for some suggestions to improve, not to say fix mind you, and just improve a seriously butchered sheetrock job.
I pulled down 3 disintegrating ancient recycled kitchen cabinets from a wall in my art studio to put up more useful shelving. Turns out the cabinets were up and the walls were finished around them. Now I have an approx 4'x8' section of wall covered with bits and pieces of crudely fitting bare sheetrock with none of the 9 'seams' (yes there are 9 of them) taped. There are huge gaps, crumbled corners, bowed seams and tape tails, nothing remotely resembles level with any other piece.
I have no desire to really fix this ie remove and replace. I would like to just generally be able to paint over that section and let the stuff on the shelves obscure the hideous wall behind it.
I am out of my league here, I know how to do it right but don't know enough how to fix what I would not do :). I just tried an entire container of vinyl spackling but have not come away feeing encouraged. Is that the answer; I just need a whole lot more of spackle to give something to paint over or, is there something else to slap on to create the illusion of a finished wall (rarely seen and going to get pretty banged up anyway – it is a shop.) ;)
Mahalo

Welcome to the forums! Well, you can fix it and use up a ton of compound and tape, or R&R it and go watch the ball game. Your choice. Replacing the bad pieces (which were probably just put there as spacers anyway) won't be a formidable task, and you won't have but a couple of seams to deal with. Let us know if we can help further.

...and don't use spackling! it's for minor repairs, you need to use joint compound. If you opt to fix what you have, you need to tape all the joints and probably skim coat the entire section. As Chandler said, it might be easier to replace the pieces with new drywall.

...and don't use spackling! it's for minor repairs, you need to use joint compound. If you opt to fix what you have, you need to tape all the joints and probably skim coat the entire section. As Chandler said, it might be easier to replace the pieces with new drywall.Mahalo,
I decided to have a whack at it with joint compound since the rest of the walls were pretty sloppy as well. Thank you for that, somewhere I read spackle was for filling gaps LOL. Much to my surprise it is looking pretty good. At least in line with all the other recycles and use up what have materials going into this little (turned bigger) project. Haven’t bought anything yet :cool: