8 Different Ways to Skim Coat Drywall!

welcome back to Vancouver Carpenter today we're going to go over eight different methods you could use to skim coat a textured ceiling each one of these will have its pros and cons and I will go over all of them but first I want to say a quick shout out to Brixton Brixton is the painting contractor who has contracted this job to me and if you are looking to get some interesting work done check out his page you can see he does a lot of you know gold leaf and plasters and painting and again big thank you Brixton so back to the regular scheduled programming so there's a lot of different ways that somebody could go about this and I will be trying to show only viable methods so not every single conceivable way but all of the ways that somebody is likely to try and the pros and cons to each method so the first thing we're going to start with is pen and knife so I am not a pan and knife guy but I will try and show you some of the pros and cons here so when dipping into the pan one of the biggest cons is you've got the mud right out to the edges of the blade so what tends to happen when you try and do your first pull here is it will drip off the edges of the knife so a solution to that that a lot of people do is they will wipe off the corners of the knife that's fine but it does seem like an extra motion and it's also pretty hard on the wrist to be pushing the material across like this it does have some plus sides I don't think I'm going to go much further than this to be honest because I'm finding this so annoying to try and do wiping off the corners and I only get about half the distance on my spread you also have to have your mud kind of thin just to keep it workable but yeah this is painful for me too not just you guys trust me the good thing about a knife is it's pretty get in into the corners like so and I can do the same thing with the trowel I'm making a mess I'm so not proficient with this tool when it's easy to get into the corners is right here so I can very easily and controllably get that that definitely didn't put enough mud onto this I think we'll have to restart with our next method but I would say if you're proficient with the panning knife you'll be able to do it way faster and way better but let's get to a hawk and trowel that's how I really like to do it so yeah I really don't think a pan and knife is an Ideal tool for skimming large areas in this case I got some mud on the hawk and I got a 16 inch travel as opposed to a 12 inch knife so I'm just gonna start spreading it yeah I can get that last six inches in one spread definitely a little easier and I might not get the full spread here but so one thing I do is I always put it on this way and come back this way to help reduce bubbles just pull a little bit of that so you can definitely see that like a trowel is definitely better for large broad spaces now I have a crumb in my mud that's always annoying take the extra I had and finish off that little space anyways let's do this again [Applause] okay so we got one line here and to get into the corner I always just use my six inch knife which I keep in the same hand that I'm holding the hop so that's a pretty good proficient method in fact I often do this in place of a lot of the ones I'm about to show you but let's get to the next method which would be Hawk and knife so I do think that Hawk and knife has some advantages and that is simply just placement of the mud blob it's not right out to the edges so you can more controllably spread the stuff without dripping it off the edges I still find it a slow and awkward way to do it but the learning curve on a knife is way faster than a trowel I'm sure if I spent the time using knives more often I could spread it more efficiently because I would slowly develop the muscles to do so but I have developed the muscles for trowels not knifes as is very apparent that's enough of that uh if I even have enough mud on here but yeah I think that this is a good method of using a knife but I still don't think that a knife and a trowel is actually a good method for skimming at a ceiling because the application of the mud is still too slow so one of the downsides to using a hawk and a knife is that it's hard to clean off the build up right there as you're you know always going like this so you tend to get a little crummier and crustier but uh let's get to the next method which is a roller and a knife so on this method we are just going to take a paint roller this is I think maybe a half inch nap roller the nap of the roller isn't as important because it just gets covered in mud it's more how you use it so as you can see I've got it all covered in mud there and I now have the super fun and messy job of applying the mud to the ceiling I don't like this method because of how messy it is however I believe that this is actually the best method for the DIY or the contractors that are trying to do some of their own mud work it Point proven right there takes a bit to get the swing of it before you stop dropping six inch pigeon blobs but yeah seriously though I have done this a ton and it still happens to me from time to time uh that was my first pass so once the mud gets worked into the roller it tends to stay on the ceiling and on the roller a little better but yeah at first it can be pretty messy you're also going to get splattered in mud which I am right now and I'm not enjoying very much it gets easier I promise the nice thing about this method though is it very easily applies a pretty uniform coat which is what most beginners struggle with is getting that kind of uniform color it also is really good at working out the bubbles now I don't usually like to do this on my first coat because I can apply my first coat very quickly and efficiently with the hawk and trowel I like to do this on my second coat when the bubbles get intense because I find that's when it has the most benefits so as you can see using a nice makes it really easy to just get a nice smooth and pretty flat surface so I think that a pan and knife with a roller is absolutely the most user-friendly method to do this job so the next one would be well roller plus Hawk and trowel it's not actually a bad method okay check this out 20 inch trowel so I have actually used this method a lot and that is roll out a huge swath I should have gone wider but I actually want to get back to doing this my preferred way but I thought I'd show you guys this method the 20 inch trowel just does a really good job of smoothing it out and if you are proficient with travels this can be a very effective way to do it because you can go a long way between liftoffs and leaves just generally a very nice flat surface so I love this method I use it a lot at least I used to until I stopped wanting to use the roller altogether but we're not quite done using the roller so we're gonna do one last thing with it before we get onto some of the other methods okay next we get into skimming blades so as you can see I got this nice handle with a big flat blade on here that has some Flex to it that's really good at skimming this stuff out so the downside here is now we're starting to get into investing into more expensive tools as opposed to just a pan in the knife which ultimately will do the same job it just won't do it quite as quickly so if you're professional definitely investing in something like this is worth it but it does have some downsides too and we'll get into those in a bit after we see how it does up there so this is a 32 inch one which is pretty big I actually like a 24 even though I don't have one okay I haven't done this in a while so forgive me but it really I actually don't have the angle right so let's adjust that I had it a bit too flat so I couldn't put the pressure in the right place so generally it leaves it very flat but as you can see over such a big space it can't get into the dips and Hollows so you kind of have to go back let's do one more back here I mean it's pretty darn good though and it's so fast it really has a lot of wow factor to it so cleaning it off is a little bit annoying not a total pain but not as fast as a swipe of a trowel on a hawk and at the end of the day we are still left with the mess of using a roller I hate how messy my buckets get from doing this and I honestly just can't stand the mess on the floor drives me crazy and other than the spots where it just can't put enough pressure like that It generally does a really nice job not perfect but very fast and quite flat but at the end of the day I feel like I have better control with the trowel and I can more evenly put the pressure where it needs to be and get a flatter looking more bubble free finish when I use a trowel so uh I actually like this and in this case right here I'm using a 16 inch trellis which is great because it's pretty wide but it doesn't put too much or too little pressure on yeah 16 inch trowel is actually a really really nice width for doing a roll and skim and one thing skimming blades are absolutely not effective at is getting right into the corners so a lot of the time when I've used skimming blades what I do is I just go around the whole room and I don't worry about the corners and I tune them up by hand like this after I find it's a lot faster than messing around trying to get that thing in the corner because you only cause yourself grief by trying to get it perfect with a skimming braid so let's get on to some of these other methods so one of the best methods is actually using a sprayer and then a skimming blade so you really thin the mud down and you spray it through a machine like a Graco I don't have one so that's why I can't show you but you spray it all on and then you walk on and then you walk along dragging this guy so that one is really effective the downside to that is there's usually a lot of protection involved like you have to go around the room with poly and plastic especially around windows and all sorts of stuff so it's very in labor intensive in the beginning but then the process of actually spraying and skimming goes very quickly so in my opinion that's probably the most professional one however there is a new method that I personally am really interested in and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes and that is drywall robots yes I'm serious the robots are coming for your job do you really want it that bad seriously skimming ceiling sucks but yeah these machines can actually spray on the joint compound they spray it on so perfectly apparently they then just come back with like a Festool plain X Type sander and sand it down so um I'm actually really interested in something like that long term like if they could make those small enough to get into a residential building you know a job like this where really all you kind of have to do is protect some of the things that need protecting and then you set the robot free on the job like yeah I'm interested in that because this work is so hard on your neck and shoulders that I think if we can automate it some way I think it's all the better anyways I'm sure it'll be very cost prohibitive for a long time and in the meantime I think you got your job security drywall dudes don't worry about it now that we are done that I can go back to my preferred method of getting this job done which is strap on the old stilts my knee is finally feeling good enough to use these again I tore my Meniscus about a year and a half ago and I just didn't feel stable or steady on stilts after that I didn't tear it on stilts I did it skateboarding as most of you probably could have figured out the ones that have been following long enough to see what I do in my spare time but yeah so I've got a couple of buckets of mud on a cart to be able to easily move it around 16 inch trowel Hawk a nice full bucket of mud and a you know clear space is very important when working on stilts get this a little more out of the way and right back to it so had I not been filming a video this is what I would have been doing the whole time because I just find that sometimes you spend more time you spend more time dragging more tools up and around and sometimes the old school methods in the long run when you add up all the extra time and expense end up not being that bad after all so yeah let me know in the comments what's your preferred method for skimming out a ceiling I really like doing it this way at least on the first coat sometimes you just have to get the ruler out on the second coat because the bubbles get so bad without it but nothing A little elbow grease can't solve into the corners here find having less Tools in my hand less tools to bring up to the job less tools to clean less tools to spend money on in the long run just ends up being cheaper and faster go figure but you do have to have the trowel skills if you want to roll that way and I definitely find that the finished result uses less mud especially because half of it isn't going on the floor uses less mud and ends up being a little more precise show you guys that is eight different ways to skim a ceiling this is my preferred way I hope you guys are doing awesome again big thanks to Brixton for letting me film on this job and thanks for watching Vancouver Carpenter I mean okay we'll call it Vancouver drywaller today but whatever hope you guys are doing well till the next one I got a ceiling to finish so have a good one

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 75,574

Keywords: skim coat drywall, drywall repair, drywall repair patch, 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: TunQgtijEdg

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2023