Drywall Repair!!! Fixing a classic MESH TAPE CRACK!

welcome back to vancouver carpenter so right here you guys we have a classic mesh tape crack so this could be from a number of things uh my guess is it actually might be from improper fastening hopefully it's not from poor framing like say where two studs are joined together improperly so they're able to shift because i can't really fix that without opening up the wall let's hope that it's just improper fastening and maybe a poor choice of mud but let's take a closer look and see what we can figure out so the first thing that leads me to believe this is improper fastening is when i push on it i can move the drywall so obviously i mean no matter how you taped it if the drywall the two sheets can move independently from one another it's gonna crack no matter what you tape it with so one of the other things that can cause a mesh tape crack is if the joint wasn't full maybe they just put the mesh tape on and they put mud on and they only got about an eighth of an inch in here but when i push on the mud it's not cracking and going in so there was probably enough mud in this joint the whole thing was just poorly fastened all right now that i know what the problem is i can start to figure out what the solution is so obviously refastening the drywall is going to be one of the first things and we're also going to have to chamfer out this joint so what i mean by chamfer out the joint is find where the crack starts and what we're going to be doing is just carving it at about a 45 degree angle roughly we just want to get that cracked separated mud out of there that's the main goal here that's always the first thing that you do when doing a mesh tape repair that went a little far so there's not much build up here so i'm not going to actually worry about pulling the mesh tape out and trying to get a recess i'm just gonna carve enough of this out that i have a nice solid chunk in here and ideally ideally it helps to get the old mud out if you can but but whenever you can try and get that old mud out of there basically if we want to stand you know if we want to have a good shot at actually repairing this we need to get it back to pretty close to square one in terms of being able to glue the joint back together so both of these boards are moving pretty well which yeah it's just not enough fasteners so normally you're supposed to use setting compound so like quick set muds with mesh tape but those will fail too mesh or a quick set will fail with mesh tape as well if it's not properly fastened i've also seen a lot of joints with mesh tape and regular mud holed up indefinitely if the board's really well fastened and there's not a lot of seasonal movement it can hold up indefinitely all right there we go that's nice and empty again and it goes right up to about here this little space is going to be one of the parts of the office that i film in and i just didn't want to be looking at this mesh tape crack on camera all the time and when i'm trying to think about what i have to say to the camera so all right there we go so now we can get some mud in there before we break out the mud though we got to solve obviously the root of the problem which is poor fastening i'm just taking my time with the impact driver yes i have drywall drills i needed this for something else though and i didn't feel like bringing both tools inside the house and if we're just doing a small repair there's no need to get the specialized tools out it's not like i'm hanging a few sheets or anything so yeah i can see it's not moving now i can see there's like a 1 8 lip here where this board kind of needs to get sucked down this was the more solid board but it still needs something and thankfully there is wood so it's not like the stud was way over on this side or anything thankfully i'm able to grab i should say the screws are able to grab because if they weren't that would be a pretty big challenge actually i would just have to angle the screws to the best of my ability hoping that they're actually doing something okay and you got to look for blown out spots like here we have a nice big blown out spot you know you want to fix all the damage board so you can see what there was there that's because there was oh there was this was held in by nails okay now i'm gonna have to get something to pound that in a little bit i don't think that's under the level of the board that's what happens when you hit the nails too hard i mean nails kind of suck anyways but definitely if you don't know how to install them hopefully there's something here [Music] uh yeah a whole a whole lot of air so we're not gonna fasten this one because there's nothing there but that is now ready time to mix up some mud the next thing you're going to want to do is vacuum it out really well so that the new mud can get a nice bond to the edge of the drywall that way it'll be a nice strong joint so i just mixed up some five minute quick set this is the hamilton brand that i love so i haven't added any glue to it you'll notice i do that in some of my videos the adding glue is something i do because some of the locally available products in my area just don't have good adherence and they've failed me a few times adherence adhesion okay so i'm pre-filling right now to really make sure that we get that joint nice and full after it's full i'm going to be doing a bit of a cheat so normally i would recommend you know let this stuff actually set up before installing the tape but what i'm going to do unfortunately this is 20 minute mud so i got to work pretty quick but what i'm going to do is i'm going to wait about 5 minutes for the really dry edges of the drywall to suck the moisture out of the mud and then it'll be firm enough that i can lay some tape down and do the repair if i do it right now there's a risk especially of a bulbous area like this just kind of falling out and making the tape stick out in that area which is why i would usually recommend pre-filling and waiting for it to set up and then scraping it down so in this case we will just wait for it to pull some of the moisture out it's now been about five minutes and you can see where i wiped it mostly flat it's pulled in so much so that is from the dry edges pulling that moisture in in the bigger spots it hasn't shrunk as much but you can see it's just sucking it right in okay so i've actually chosen to use fiberfuse for this repair this was a six inch roll that i just cut down the middle to make these little three inch pieces you can get it in two inch wide rolls it's great stuff especially for repairs like this because it lays down so much flatter you could do this with paper tape or even with mesh tape i'm serious even though mesh tape failed because we did such a good job re-fastening it cleaning it out and getting that new mud in there the mesh tape would probably actually hold up but once bitten twice shy so i'm going to continue on with this stuff because i know it will do the job long term now one of the things about using fiberfuse is you don't want your mud too thick so even though i'd love this stuff to thicken up a little bit i won't be able to actually get the fiberfuse on if i wait so what we're gonna do we'll start on this little top one pretty easy you want to spread it pretty thin like no more than an eighth otherwise you're gonna struggle getting the mud out from underneath so it's pretty straightforward i'm just wiping in multiple different directions if you have a brand new taping knife the sharp square edges can tear this stuff pretty easily and if you run your knife over it really hard too many times you can tear this stuff then it's going to fail so you got to be careful of that but that's pretty good right there okay i'm going to butter this up yeah it's just starting to thicken up but i'm going to make sure that i apply the mud really thin and the beauty with this stuff is like if you don't get quite enough mud on the wall you can still like it bleeds through the top a little bit so that you don't get those nasty unexpected dry spots yeah i'm hustling now i probably only have maximum 10 minutes before this stuff sets up to an unworkable state it's a pleasure how easily this stuff tears too i'm gonna avoid overlapping it so we'll go just under but yeah same thing just slowly and carefully wipe this stuff out yeah i know you guys don't see me use this stuff very often it's because i just don't really carry it around i only have it for the uh the large repairs like plaster repairs and stuff but it lays so flat and this this three inch wide piece is going to be even easier to hide because it's just like such a big flat piece of tape okay i'm pretty happy with how this is turning out that spot with the big blowout there isn't bulging so the great thing i'm happy with how flat it is i mean this wall was not flat to begin with you can tell by the like quarter inch here quarter inch here so we're gonna have a huge hump but it's not worth fixing that in my opinion on this job and now that this is all sitting so nice and flat i'm really happy with it before this mud fully kicks off i'm actually going to give this a quick coat just to speed up the process not a thick one just kind of filling in the edges yeah it's literally just setting up right now when i said 10 minutes i was wrong it was about three minutes that i had left we're not putting much over the top of the tape right now i'm just building out the edges yeah gotta love spreading mud that's kicking off but hey oh and especially when there's still a screw to fix i don't know if you guys can even see that oh of course it's a nail thanks original owner i'm just going to use a drill bit and a hammer to sink that nail a little bit under the surface so it doesn't cause me so much grief and now while there's still time oh barely it's getting harder by the sec never mind the mud is thickening up by the second starting to sound like a vag rad for a second there sorry guys oh boy i'm in trouble now i love this knife this is like one of my old eight inch blue steel knives i've had this knife almost since i started taping just hasn't seen a lot of use even though i love it so it's still in such good shape but it's also something to be said about the flex and feel of a nice blue steel knife it just it feels so good all right that's good enough i'm fussing with it now okay hopefully it's kicked off enough yep all right now that it is kicked off we need to really quickly knock down the lap marks i've already mixed my quick set so it's you know sitting in my pan ready to put on the wall but i just need to knock down any little high spots so that we can get this next coat on but we're pretty far ahead you know we skipped both the pre-fill and the um like we got the pre-fill tape and first coat kind of all in the same mix so you can do it once you start to become proficient but it definitely you know takes some skill right you got to know what you're doing and be familiar with the materials you're using and it is now yep ready for so this is the coat that's really gonna kind of skim it out and not quite skim no we're gonna do another top coat on top of this believe it or not but this is the one that's going to be giving it its defining shape some of you might be wondering why i'm using a pan and knife well it's just easier when you're mixing quick set you use a pen and knife because you mix small batches in the pan it's easy all right sorry you guys i'm not talking about the stages of coding in this what i mean is i'm not teaching the basics of like you know feather fill pass blah blah blah um you know like basically i need to get this on the wall and get it smoothed out before it kicks off i don't really have the time to explain the nuances of all the coasts but you guys know if you've been following a while you know i have a billion videos on that so i know you're not deprived you may be deprived but you're not deprived okay if you're getting something out of this video feather that like button check my blade yeah we're the right way that's good enough okay this has had some time to set up i scraped it down a little bit while it was in the magic state where it can be easily filed down or whatever you want to call it scraped time to skim it okay we are now just going to skim this with some this is just some topping mud that could be topping all purpose i'll put this light basically it's some air drying mud just so that the paint sticks to it real nice and that it sands easily and because we already did a pretty good job here i'm not gonna worry too much about trying to leave much on here this is just a nice tight skim coat to make our life easy when we sand [Applause] a little bit of crusties big more krusty's oh it's gonna take a little bit more mud on there it happens it especially happens when doing quick set work come on i just want this to be done feather that edge all right we are almost there that looks good enough there okay in case you were wondering if uh there's some adidas sponsorship going on in this video no that's just the shoe box that i have a bunch of receipts in nothing fishy going on here and why did i go back to the hawk and trowel instead of keep using the pan and knife well i was done mixing quick sets so i'd rather just use what i'm most proficient with now at this point i mean why wouldn't i okay let's get some finish passes here some swedish passes some canadian passes ah sorry guys i know you like the finish passes best all right we're getting pretty close here pretty close a little bit of tiddling oh one more one more let's bring that in from up here and just try and get that nice and close all right oh do i dare i don't even know if you can see all those lift off that's good enough now it's time to stop messing with it okay now let's take a look at this as we can see just some basic little lift-offs easy sanding it's generally looking super smooth i'm happy with that so you know that repair was basically roughly about an hour's worth of work between the waiting for the quick set to set well you guys that is how to handle the classic mesh tape crack so let's summarize that because it really is really simple i showed you guys kind of the advanced professional way to fix it but it's basically carve out that crack get out the loose mud uh re-fasten where necessary just if the board is moving refasten it because it needs it and this one did next you got to pre-fill it and you can do this whole thing with regular air drying muds waiting between coats for drying so what i mean is waiting overnight for the mud to dry properly because when we're using kwikset that doesn't dry it what it does is it sets allowing me to apply another coat because it's not going to be mushy and moving all over the place but this is still going to take probably about three days to dry unless i put a big fan blasting on it overnight then it would be dry in the morning i'm probably not going to so this is going to take about three three days to dry anyways let me get back to that so what were we talking about we talked about the pre-fill and then you can tape it with whatever tape you know if you're using quick set like i said you could get away with mesh tape why bother it's already failed so either paper tape or fiberfuse is going to do really well i will link the fiberfuse in the description of the video below if you're looking for it it's definitely a good tape i like the stuff i just don't use it very often for whatever reason and next you're going to need two to three coats whatever it takes to actually hide that tape actually it's not about hiding the tape it's about hiding the joint it's easy to hide the tape by creating a little mound over it it's hard to hide the joint you got to go big anyways you guys i hope you got something out of this video it's a pretty basic repair it's just a little labor intensive but as you can see it's actually pretty quick if you know what you're doing like this i i could be in and out of a job you know down to the final coat in like an hour or less if i was using five minute mods which would be a little bit too fast yeah i could get it done really fast but bill for two or four hours i don't know i don't know why i've been talking about this if you're still here i don't even know why you're still watching i hope your project's going well thanks for watching till the next one you guys

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 214,405

Keywords: drywall repair, drywall repair patch, drywall repair large hole, drywall repair water damage, drywall repair hacks, drywall repair around electrical outlet, drywall repair ceiling water damage, drywall crack, drywall crack repair, taping and mudding, plaster repair, taping drywall, fix drywall

Id: y-yWZLTGWNU

Length: 21min 19sec (1279 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022