Drywalling Tips

There's a couple of things about drywalling, and I wanna make one thing very clear. I get a lot of questions and I see a lot of mistakes about this. Number one, when you finish drywall, when you mud it, you're gonna need to put three coats of mud on that drywall. Don't think that you can go through there and just put one thick coat, it's not gonna work.

Drywall mud shrinks when it drys and when that happens, you might get little cracks and especially if you do a really thick coat like that.

So you're gonna go and you're gonna put a fairly thin layer of mud down. And then you'll tape. And then you just wanna flatten that out so that there's no air bubbles or places where there isn't any mud in contact with the tape.

Now mudding is a little bit of an art. So I'm not gonna be able to describe to you exactly how to do it and you're just gonna do it right. It's gonna take some practice, but you don't want a whole lot of mud left over. Spend a little time on it, but again it's something that you're gonna have to take some practice at and you'll get better at it.

Then you're gonna let that coat dry. If you're just using regular mud, like you get in a home improvement store, then you're probably gonna let it sit at least a day you'll come back the next day and you're gonna do your second coat, but you're gonna use a wider knife. With the first coat, you use maybe like a 4 inch knife. With the second coat, you might jump up to an 8 or 10 inch knife. And then your last coat, you're gonna do the same thing, put it on there, make it nice and smooth and let it dry.

Your last coat, you're gonna try to get an even bigger knife, like a 12 inch knife. When you're first starting to do this, you might need to sand in between coats. You're gonna very lightly sand, do not over sand your mud because you're gonna just take it right off again. One of the goals here of using the mud is, you have to have a little bit of a layer there and you're gonna create avery gradual and almost un-noticable hump. But it's got to cover that paper. If there's not enough mud to cover the paper or the screw hole, whatever it is, then you're gonna see it through the paint and that's not what you want.

So if you are having to sand between coats because maybe you've got some ridges there that just are gonna make it real hard for you to put the next coat on, sand very lightly, just enough to knock down those ridges. Dont' try to just completely eliminate them, just knock them down and then try to mud over the whole thing. Do your second coat. You want everything to be wider. If you're doing joints, make sure that you widen up that joint, widen up the mud so that it spreads out farther because you're gonna want to try to thin it out towards the edges.

Then you've got your third coat and hopefully it's a final coat. You're gonna try to make everything look real pretty now. One tool that is really gonna be helpful to you right now is a halogen light. Make sure you put it on an angle with the wall. And what that's gonna do is create some serious shadow contrast. Any imperfections in the wall are gonna look a lot worse. So most of the time you're gonna be able to catch any of the problems right here.

Make sure that light's on there. That it's making shadows. And then when you go through and you mud, make sure that you cover up everything that needs to be covered. You will be able to come back and either sand or lightly sponge down the wall.

I personally prefer sponging. So any kinda work that has to be done after I mud, I'll usually do it with sponging. I don't like the dust from the drywall and I really like the kinda smoothed out and spread out look that sponging gives you. If you haven't tried that, go to your home improvement store and see if they've got in the drywall section a sponge with a little, it's kinda like got a brilo pad side to it and then the other side is just a regular sponge. So you can use that brilo pad for some really rough spots and use the sponge to smooth everything out.

Now aside from your joints, I also wanna point out your screws because this is an area where a lot of people try to skimp on because, let's face it, there are a lot of screws. If you go in and you do a remodel job you might have a lot of screws and some people don't want to deal with them. With the screws, it's just as important, you've gotta have three coats on there.

Also I wanna give you a little trick, a technique that'll help you get a better job and get through it quicker. Instead of just smearing on a little bit of mud on one screw and wiping it off, and going to the next one, smear and wipe. Take your knife and your mud and do a streak down the wall, let's say you've got three screws vertically. Okay. Take you knife and wipe it down the wall so that you now have a white stripe kinda going from the top screw, all the way across to the middle one and all the way down to the bottom one. So one long wipe. And then you're gonna take your knife and wipe that up and flatten it out.

At this point don't push real hard, you're wanting mostly to get a lot of mud inside the screw hole. And then you don't wanna try to wipe everything back off because you're gonna actually build up a bit of a layer here. This is gonna do three things. It's gonna make the application of the mud go a lot quicker and second it's gonna make your sanding job a lot easier. Cause you're just gonna sand over one big broad area. And another thing it's gonna do is make the finished job look better.

A lot of times I walk into a house and I see little flat circular spots on the wall. And I can always tell that's where a drywall screw is because that kind of thing justshows right through the paint.

So with this technique, what you're gonna do on the second coat is actually use a bigger knife again, and you're gonna broaden that strip out so that it covers a larger area. You're gonna try to feather things out. When I get done with a wall. When I've done the screws, it almost looks like I have several butt joints down the wall, every few feet so. Because the third coat of mud is so wide, it's about 10 or 12 inches wide, just for those screws. But when the final job is done and the wall is painted, it looks a lot flatter, it feels a lot flatter, and you can not see those imperfections in the wall.