🟢Smoothing Out A ROUGH UGLY Wall by Skim Coating it - LEVEL 5 Babys Butt Smooth

are you looking to learn how to do a level 5 smooth finish and you want to know what is a level 5 well I'm going to show you how we're gonna turn this bumpy textured wall into a totally smooth level 5 finish and I'll do that right after this [Music] hey welcome back to my channel and we're gonna get right into this level 5 stuff now first of all what do we mean by level 5 well basically it's a smooth finish but there's actually kind of two levels of smooth level four would be where it's smooth but it's not perfect basically level five is as smooth as you can get it we're pretty much no defects of any kind shows and that means humps and that means Nick's dings scratches it's basically as smooth as you can get it so let's go over the definition real quickly this is from the USG comm website in USD is a major manufacturer of drywall supplies first of all you see four level four we'll skip down to what it's basically for is under light textures so in other words this is not really meant to be left just smooth something will go over it like wallpaper or light texture now I'll leave a link to this website in the description down below the videos if you want to read the rest of it but now let's move on to level 5 level 5 is the highest quality finish and it's meant to provide a uniform surface and minimize the possibility of joint photographing now let's move down here to this part right here where it shows that in order to obtain a level 5 finish you need a thin skin coat of joint compound and you basically wipe it off fairly tightly so it's a very thin skin coat then you sand it down and you take it a few more steps which is what I'm going to teach you here so to get level 5 what you do is you finish your drywall just as good as you can if you're doing repairs or doing new construction you just get it as far as you can you've got it sanded smoothed out touched up if you think it's pretty much ready for texture for example and then to take it to level 5 that would be like level 4 to take it to level 5 you have to skim coat it there's no two ways around it if you don't what happens is wherever you've got mud and it's sanded it will come out just glossy slick smooth no texture to it at all but the paper of drywall has a texture to it it's kind of a woven texture and you'll see the difference between the two if you just paint it if you put a really good stipple on it like a three-quarter inch roller and several two to three coats of paint primer and all that you can sometimes make it look pretty close to a level five but to get a true level 5 requires coating every square inch of the drywall with drywall mud and it's a really thin layer because you've already got it nice and smooth you can do it several ways one way if you're doing big jobs like hospitals in that what they will do is they'll use an airless paint sprayer because now you can spray it on everywhere get it on fairly quickly there's no knife marks but it takes about a five thousand dollar airless to do that so not many people do that the other way is simply a pan and a knife you put it on sand it down touch it up and get it that way on a smaller area or you could do it on a bigger you can roll it on with a paint roller and I've showed these two methods and other videos so I'll put the thumbnails up here if you want to go check out how to do it so you'd basically roll it on with a paint roller and then smooth it out with something like this craft skimming blade I'll put a link to all this stuff in the description down below if you want to check it out and we do make a small Commission on anything if you click on it and purchase it and we thank you for your support but it's more than all that once we skimmed it all out and we sanded it it's still not done and I'll show you why here in a little bit there's one last step kind of to the other way you can do it is with this skimming blade which I'm going to show you today because I've already showed you how to do it with a knife and a paint roller so now we're going to show you the advantage of using this okay since we're using this for skim coating to do this skim coating what you would need to coat something this rough is a sample a way of sanding it and the blade and then your pan and knives to put it on so your basic mudding tools and then of course we got this blade okay our objective here is to get a level 5 finish so it's probably going to take two coats now the first step is because of all this bumpiness on here you want to scrape it there's always gonna be some little Peaks that'll make your knife jump and chatter and you'll get the washboard look on here and it'll just mess up what you're trying to do so just get you a blade and scrape the whole thing first and then we're gonna send it okay now the next step is you want to send it you could probably probably get by without sanding it after you scrape it but I found that doing these two together gives me an even better chance of knocking down those last little Peaks that that are sticking out so I'd like to use an 80 grit on a sand pole if you're a novice there's a sander called a radius sender so I can't show it to you today but here's a picture of it and this thing works great because this one's a little harder to use for amateurs because of the fact that it sometimes they want to flip like that the radius doesn't want to so check that out in the description down below just go over once real quick knock down the final Peaks and we're ready to move on [Music] okay now normally on something like this you're not gonna have that much dust so you probably don't need to dust it you can if you want to though okay the next step would be to put a solid coat of mud on this and float it all out now I do like to when I'm skim coating I try and put the mud on fairly evenly to start so I I usually don't like to leave too much of this rough stuff so if you see me go over it a couple of times I'm evening the mud out see right there I had a little light spot so if you can see that on camera it's a little light so what I did is I still got mud on here I just come down when I get close to that I can lay a little more mud on it and it goes away now it doesn't have to be super smooth at this point [Music] so the next step would be to just start smoothing it and whatever works for you you can run it sideways top to bottom I'm not even sure what I'm gonna do I left the mesh tape in there oh well now you'll notice on my my system here this is a brand new setup this is my brand new studio this is video number two one of the things I've done is made this accent light up here I can turn this on and off as I need to and if I really want it make everything stand out I turn off these other lights and you can see the defects even more you can probably see the bubbles over here this is the first time I've used this so I hope you can see these they stand out much better when you're light across the surface like this alright now for a level 5 or smooth finish this is about all I would take it because I know that heavier texture to get it level 5 it's gonna take two coats anyway okay a little trick your little drywallers trick when you're coding wide stuff like this and you got these overlap marks you want to leave this lap mark that looks kind of like this versus I'm going to come over here to the edge and room this if you leave an edge where you're leaving a gouge type edge that's much harder to sand off the one where this edge is actually going up on top of that one I call it a lap mark when it does that all you got to sand off is that little peak right there it sands off easy if you do it this way you pretty much can't sand it off so the way you leave lap marks correctly is when you want the lap mark over there you put a slight more amount of pressure on the other side and then like when I did this when I put the more pressure on the bottom that pushed the lap mark to the middle I don't have any of those gouge type lap marks and it's going to make your life a whole lot easier we're gonna let this dry overnight come back sand it do another coat okay I've let this dry overnight it's dried thoroughly so the first step for today is just to sand it [Music] now I would recommend you wear a mask if I wear mask it's hard to talk but I'd recommend you wear one for safety [Music] if you start seeing texture coming through you may be going too far because you're gonna have to recover that so you're trying to just smooth it out so we can do the next coat now I'm sending with 80 grit so it's pretty aggressive and if you can see right here there's a lot of sanding scratches and that's okay at this step but I basically leveled it out so now if you see it's still fairly rough there's some of the texture showing through right here the bumpiness and then there's all these sand scratch marks that I'm leaving and that's okay but we're trying to take off these lap marks like here now when you sand afterwards there's always gonna be this little layer of dust on here so I recommend that you vacuum that off if you want you can go over it with a damp rag or a damp mop but be very gentle because it doesn't take anything to damage it with a wet rag so just go over it lightly so at this point we're basically ready to do the same thing again we're going to put another coat on I'm gonna put it on pretty thin because I don't see much texture left to cover but you don't want it real thin at this point unless it came out really really good but I'm I know that there's still a few deeper things so I'm going to put a medium thin coat on [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right that's coated so now it's time to let that dry we're gonna put a fan on it come back send it with some fine grit will probably go to 220 and this thing should be ready for texture almost ready for level 5 I'm going to do a separate video continuation of this to show you how to do a level 5 okay this dried so on camera right now it probably looks really good and it's it's in pretty damn good shape this is smooth from top to bottom except there's one area can you see it it runs right down the middle where we overlapped it and that's why I created this upper lighting here so I can show it to you better this should make it stand out a little bit better and I'll show you a picture of it here and all that is is it's the area where the two overlapped so the one final step for a skim coating like this would be to sand it and then do minor touch-up it doesn't have to be perfect depends on what kind of texture you're putting the heavier the texture the less work you got to do but we definitely want to get rid of that one for this step I have changed my sandpaper to a 220 grit because you don't want to leave those scratches like we did before make sure this is in good shape if you got any little torn edges wrinkles anything like that it will scratch right where that's at now here's a little sanding pointer you know we were trying to mainly sand out this middle area when you're sanding you want to make sure that if you are using anything that's rectangular or even square don't hold it straight like this hold it at an angle otherwise those straight lines tend to dig in and even if it's square hold it a little bit of an angle if it's round it doesn't matter but there's one more tip don't concentrate just right on one area back and forth move up and down a little bit so that you're kind of feathering out your sanding or you're gonna kind of dig yourself a valley in here so look more like this and that'll give you a lot better results so we'll go ahead and vacuum this so I've swapped over to that I've already sanded this a little bit what I'm going to show you is that this looks pretty good on camera so what you have to do for level 5 is you have to learn how to slide light it strongly the more I believe it's oblique the lighting angle is the more it will magnify every defect don't be too alarmed because doing that makes even the best job look rough it's going to show every scratch every defect but you're learning to look for the bigger defects that you need to fix these tiny scratches paint roller we'll cover that up with a stipple this light up here is decent but what you really want is a nice strong light it can be a flashlight whatever you've got but pretty directional so that you shine right down the surface okay I'm gonna walk you over here and show you some defects I've got a few circled right here you might better see them already but watch when I put the light up here and put it strongly like that it just makes them jump out a little more so these are the kind of things that level-5 would absolutely show sanding scratches right here they're not so bad a paint roller would cover that up that deeper one maybe not I'm gonna stand that a little bit more but overall when we look at this it looks in really good shape okay so learning to look for the defects that's part of level 5 because if you don't use that bright side lighting you'll miss a lot of those but once it's painted gets a little bit shinier the shinier you do like if you do anything beyond flat satin eggshell semi-gloss it's going to show even more and it depends on your lighting like if you put a wall sconce up here suddenly you've got that harsh lighting going down the wall if this is a ceiling and you mount a ceiling like close and it's shining down you've got the same thing that's why we get that bright light out and look for those defects so that if a light does that naturally in the future we already fixed it okay there's there's a lot of dust down here and we want to get that off you see how it stays behind that dust will make it really hard for your paint to stick right your texture if you're going to texture it but we're doing level five so you want to get that off I recommend either like a dust broom something really soft or in this case we're gonna vacuum it off all right now we're back to full brightness and I'm gonna concentrate on this end because this is where the only defects that I left are once you've got it all sanded and you think it's good is there's one basically final step here and then one on the next day or in a few hours you get your bright light out and you just walk around checking everywhere and you can take a job light or something just set it up and shine it down the wall darken the rest of the room it'll make things stand out really good and then I like to go around and just circle them now you might ask can we send these out well you probably could but sometimes you can't if it's too deep and you try and send one of these out you end up making a little divot right there and that'll show in a level-five you want this flat so you got to be careful about that so go around mark everything if you mark it with a pencil do it with two hairs and some air because it is that soft I could scratch it with a pencil so I'd like to go around and just mark everything that needs to be touched up and then I decide if I'm going to sand it out or touch it up okay so here's one of the tricks of doing the level-5 one of the problems is if you go around and touch all these up with some mud then you actually need to sand it no matter how well you wipe it off it leaves a little ring around here that can show through a little kind of Telegraph through partly because this has just been wiped off this has been sanded so there's slightly different textures and porosity so here the problem is the next day if you come back these are all gonna look invisible it's gonna dry the same exact color as this and you're gonna have a hard time finding it you can but a little trick is take some blue chalk or you could use blue food coloring I used to use a blue paint tint whatever you got blues a good color it covers well for this application okay I'm gonna add some straight powder to it it takes a little longer to mix it in here this way but we need a little bit more blue it's getting that tiny hint of it the powder sometimes just takes longer to mix up okay it's getting pretty close it took a lot to mix it up like I said I added even more powder and you probably can't see a whole lot of difference so I'm gonna put some of the mud without the tent right next to it so you can see the difference okay you see in the picture the difference in the yellow mud versus this bluish mud so you don't want it real blue or it could be hard to cover up we're just trying to make it stand out so that the next day when we come to sand it they're easy to spot so now we just put some mud on to fix anything it doesn't matter how much you put on but wipe it tight so you stand your knife up pretty firm and you wipe it completely off but level and you don't really want to leave little goobers like that but I'll dry these real quick and show you how they look okay it's dry now and you see how it just kind of pops out if I'd done that with just regular mud without the tint in it it'd be really hard to see now if you're doing like a whole house a whole room you just walk around look for these spots and touch them up now grant it if you circle them with a pencil you could probably just spot it by that sometimes as you're going through with that light you just touch them up so mark them with this bluish tint and you won't have a hard time but here's the one final step and then your level 5 is ready take a sponge and I would recommend you get a worn out one kind of slightly worn out you get the finest one you can and if it's not worn out break it in a little bits and some concrete or something just take off that harsh edge all sandpaper tends to have a harsher edge when it's new then just go through and about all you do is a quick like that will dust that off and now that it's smooth as a baby's butt the ultimate final step is be sure to prime and paint it properly be sure to put a good solid coat of primer on it and two coats of paint roll it with like a 3/8 to 1/2 inch nap roller and you should have a gorgeous smooth finish now hey I'm gonna start featuring some of your pictures this week we got a picture from one of the viewers who sent me this photo of his final texture he watched our videos did his drywall work and he did a skip trial after watching my video and this is how it came out congratulations I'm gonna put your name on the screen there if you've got photos of your project you've done send them to me I'd love to feature them give you a shout out and before you go I'm gonna put a video right there and one right there and those videos might help you out too and if you enjoy this content be sure and click the bell icon after you subscribe down below more importantly I look forward to seeing you guys on the next video you guys are why I do this so take care I'll see you next time

Channel: That Kilted Guy DIY Home Improvement

Views: 154,044

Rating: 4.8999166 out of 5

Keywords: smoothing out a wall, smoothing out a popcorn ceiling, smoothing out a textured ceiling, smoothing out a textured wall, smoothing out drywall, smoothing out popcorn ceiling, smoothing out textured walls, applying a skim coat, how to apply a skim coat, smooth wall finish, drywall finishing, level 5 drywall finish, renovation ideas, skim coat

Id: 4T6x7wiP-aA

Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 01 2020