10 Things about Mudding Drywall I wish I knew when I started!

welcome back you guys so today I am coating a plaster tie-in job where some valences were removed and I thought why not while I'm coating this why don't as each one comes to me why don't I tell you the things I wish I knew when I first started doing this because there's a lot of things that I've gotten over the 15 years that really would have been useful if I knew it earlier so I'm gonna load up here and we'll start with the first thing that comes to mind okay you guys so the first one is coating over top of paint always bubbles you might not see it on your first coat but when you go to put your next coat over top of especially dry mud and in this case the worst case scenario we have dry quick set it's going to Bubble like crazy the workaround to this is to really quickly skim it all out so I wish I knew that before because I spent so much time trying to work out those bubbles and sometimes the bubbles will come like they'll really show up a minute later and I would just be like going like this trying to wipe you can't wipe out those bubbles so what you have to do is fill it because the mud especially over top of paint is a porous surface I should say it's a porous surface over top of a non-porous surface the reason that it bubbles is because the air that's in the mud as soon as it hits the painted surface has nowhere to go on regular bare drywall it's porous and the air kind of gets forced into the board and I think that's why you can leave such a smooth coat but over top of anything painted it just bubbles like crazy so what I'm going to do here is I'm actually just going to skim this whole thing out really quickly only over top of the quick set not the new drywall and then I'm going to end up coating this whole surface even though it's a lot of moving the bench around I don't mind I'd rather just get it all skimmed out first so that I can then lay a nice coat over top of it so this is just filling the painted surface and another thing that took me a long time to learn is it one pass forces the mud into one side of the little air pockets and then this pass forces it into the other side of the little air pockets so that will make it easier so the next thing I wish I knew right from the start was if you can see your tape you haven't put enough mud on so I used to probably be in the early stages of learning how to do this a master speed bump maker because I was pretty good at making smooth walls but I wasn't very good yet at making walls that appear flat so let me give you a real quick example here I have to redo my work but so I would have you know tried to make it nice and flat like this and I would have thought okay that looks pretty good so now I'm gonna do this next one and we're going to do this next one that edge and you know for the most part other than the fact that I haven't cleaned up this corner yet for the most part it looks pretty good okay so even though there is mud over top of it in my opinion if you can see that yellow tape shining through you haven't put enough mud over top of it okay so let's coat this a little more appropriately the reason that in my opinion there's not enough mud there is when the time comes to sand and flatten out your work there's nothing to sand as soon as you sand you're going to start seeing that paper tape and it's just not going to be flat enough that's all I don't know what to say just let's get this coated and you can see what it'll actually look like it takes a lot of mud you know like if we look at this it's a bit of a hump there takes a lot of mud to make that appear flat do we have enough there yet kind of okay so now we are going to try and craft this into shape okay this part was pretty good we'll just [Applause] feather again right there does not have enough mud I can see Okay so ah here's another one okay here's another one is if you're using a trowel especially you don't have to go right into the corner you can leave it out a little bit took me a while to figure this one out it also took me a while to figure out how to go right into the corner with a trowel the trick is to be a little bit angled like this but that could use a bit more flattening out you see we're creating a pretty big flat surface over top of that tape there's just enough mud that I can't actually see the tape and now I'm going to start putting my pressure this way I knew there wasn't enough mud there one more that's better yeah feather that one more [Applause] time [Music] okay so this inside corner isn't perfect there's a lot of kind of pox there it's pretty heavy buildup it's just what it needed to get kind of flat so what I was talking about is like don't worry about trying to get it perfect with your trowel I always usually come in with my knife with my pressure like this and just one little pass we'll tune that up it's looking a lot better we could even give it one more now that's looking really smooth I'm gonna leave that clean up a few little things so that would be one of the things is use your trowel to get the big flat work or you know 12 or 10 inch knife whatever it is you use use that to get the flat work use something smaller to get the details so that's something I wish I figured out a long time ago I used to just fuss trying to get my trowel into the corners and get everything looking perfect and then maybe it was about four three four years into it I finally figured out just how quick and easy it is to do one little pass with a knife and get nicer results another thing I wish I knew when I started out was it doesn't matter how you put the mud on it matters how it looks after you take it off so for example in the earlier part of my career I would have tried to get right into the corner here to apply the mud and it's kind of slow and cumbersome it doesn't do a perfect job at this point now what I do I'll usually start from the furthest out that I have to go I gotta reload so I'll usually start from the furthest out point that I need to go oh foreign I'll just often instead of trying to get my trowel in there all silly I'll just put the mud in here like this it's just faster and easier so I used to think that because the joints going this way every pass has to go this way it doesn't it just needs enough mud in the right places so you can do the work one thing I will say is when you do everything in the direction of the joint it has a tendency to lay it a little bit flatter so this part right here because I put it on you know by the trowel like this that can have a tendency to make it a bit more wavy if you don't have a good idea of how much mud you're applying but that's something that when you've been doing it a while you kind of start to work out foreign need a little more mud here there's a massive hump in the ceiling right here so we don't need a little more we actually need a lot more right there so again one more Pass riding my trowel in the corner like that now we do that feather the edge and I'm now going to go kind of directly over the center of the joint to again just working on flattening it out now my pressure is going to be this way okay it's getting better getting better and one more Feathering [Applause] okay that's looking pretty good another thing I wish I knew when I first started is that there is intentionally a curve in the blade of your knife and no I still haven't marked the side and I looked down at every time um but in the beginning I looked for blades that didn't have much of a curve whereas now that I have experience I look for blades that have more curve than the other ones and if it doesn't have enough I might even give it a bit of a curve and the reason is you actually want it to be curving away from the wall so that the edge doesn't dig in as easily and you can manipulate the mud better now we're going to do that final pass that I was talking about that really just kind of consolidates the mud in that corner I'm not going to worry about that tiny little bit that's been left right here don't know if you can see that on camera it's just so quick and easy to just scrape that down after and I'm going to wreck the nice Corner that I've created if I try and get rid of it so it's looking pretty good all right so this next one is about like how to sequence your coating so that you can get nice crisp Corners so in the past what I would have tried to do here like right now I spent a lot of time trying to get this corner to look nice and now even though this needs to be coated if I get right up in there I'm going to ruin that corner so we're going to be applying the same principle of coating one side of a corner at a time and how that's going to work is I'm just going to stay a little bit under it so I'm almost going up too much but if I stay about three quarters of an inch below this then when I come back on my second coat what I'll do is I'll coat the top nice and tight and then I will coat the bottom nice and tight but right up to the corner so hopefully I don't need to actually film that the next day for you guys because I probably won't have a filmer here when I'm doing my final coat but if that makes sense to you guys I'm focusing on getting the corner perfect on one side and leaving some room for improvement on the other side and just making sure that I remember to sequence my coating right the next day so as you can see now I'm just like Feathering that top Edge and so there's a bit of uncoated paper up there still maybe about a quarter inch of uncoated paper and I did a good job not mashing this top corner feather my edge here feather my Edge let's just focus on this get that flattened out this flattened out and maybe one more right there somewhere right there that doesn't look pretty but it helps me show you guys another one here in the mud that time when you get a line like this let's get the light under it so you can see it better so I could probably get rid of it with the pass like that yeah what I was going to say is don't be afraid to get your knife in there and really gently you can often get rid of stuff like that with just a six inch knife this could use just a bit more work that's looking pretty good okay here's another one I wish I knew earlier um don't ignore the six inch knife so you might think well maybe I should get an appropriate size knife to coat this spot and that is what I probably would have done especially in the early days I would have gone like what will fit in here exactly but in time you will become so proficient with the six inch knife that sometimes little spots like this you will get it done faster just using a six inch knife so let's feather that edge as close to the corner as we can without touching it anything else like there I can sand so we'll get right down here gotta try and get under the casing if I can okay and now we just need one to flatten it off one or two so yeah we got one line there but without having to go and switch tools because I always keep the 12 inch trowel and the six inch knife in hand I was able to quickly and easily tackle this little spot instead of running over to the tool kit and getting something else so uh I guess what I'm saying is I wish in the beginning oh I just totally messed up the ceiling right there we can fix it there we go good enough I wish in the beginning I knew how versatile the six inch knife really was I mean honestly like I could coat a butt joint with a six inch knife if I had to and it would be passable sure a bigger knife will do a good job but yeah make friends with the six inch knife because it's definitely in my opinion the best all-round tool when it comes to taping drywall taping and finishing drywall get one with a decent curve in it and learn how to work it because that's what I'm doing right now I'm just manipulating the curve in this knife to get enough mud on here put on there in a way that will leave me an acceptable finish okay here's another little one you guys if the carpet isn't protected well oops it's gonna happen what you need to know is that it's easier to let that dry and then just take the end of your vacuum like without a nozzle on it and just kind of scrape it up and it'll come up perfectly even on dark carpet the worst thing you can do is try and scrape that up and mash it into the carpet so there's one other little tip I wish I knew earlier on don't worry about those it's just drywall mud unless maybe it's quick set full of glue then you should be careful this is just all-purpose light as soon as it's dry I'm just gonna scrape it up with my vacuum okay this one I definitely wish I knew uh the coolest way to deal with your bucket handle is like that I definitely wish I knew about that before I started doing this um if I'm saying things like that it must mean that we're getting pretty close to the end here you guys this is the last little corner I have to coat and I'm racking my brain for any last little tidbit of advice I do think I have one for you and that would be when dealing with Corners like this where everything needs to get coated out so instead of making this all pretty and then going to this one it's actually easier to get both sides coated at the same time and you can fine tune that corner you can fine tune it better when you have mud on both sides you're less likely to like severely severely gouge out one side or the other in my opinion okay so what do we have to do here we gotta get this not too much okay and we need to get this yep you know there's no exact method for coding any one spot everything can have its own unique plan of attack okay so yeah that's looking pretty good I'm just trying to get this bit done and oh a bit more there a moving start helps you not take off too much mud that's going to be good enough we got to leave that so now we've got that part done and now I can feather this feather this now I'm just generally making stuff look good I think we're just about good there yeah and now that get a big lift off like this you can flatten it out oh man I'm just gonna have to give up on this one getting worse yeah that's good okay and you remember I mentioned so we already have the mud in here now it's pretty good up to this corner so clean off the edges of your trowel that's another one the cleaner the edge of your trowel the less you're gonna pick up in the corner so now I can get right in here get as much into that corner as I can and now oh [Applause] now we're pretty much at six inch knife oh flat Hawk loses less mud every day I wish I would remember that now we are at the six inch six inch knife territory clean up those Corners get it looking as good as possible oh can we do any better in here no not really sanding can take care of that not sure if you guys can even see it if you get right up and close in there you can see there's like a bit of a line in order to solve that once it's dry I can just scrape that down so instead of trying to make it perfect now I'll do it when it's not going to gouge out big chunks so that's it those are as many things as I could think of that I wish I knew when I started coating drywall anyways you guys I'm done it's it's time to go skate now time to clean up and go skate so I hope you're doing well I'm doing well today I hope your Project's going well but I hope you're doing even better so thanks for watching you guys till the next one fudge that was the air vent [Laughter]

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 216,648

Keywords: drywall repair, drywall repair patch, drywall repair clips, drywall repair large hole, drywall repair water damage, drywall repair hacks, drywall repair ceiling water damage, drywall repair outlet box, drywall repair electrical outlet, drywall repair after wallpaper removal, drywall repair hole, drywall repair around shower, drywall repair and, drywall repair and texture, drywall repair and installation, drywall repair in bathroom, drywall patch repair and paint

Id: S9KdiAx3S10

Length: 22min 22sec (1342 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2022