How to DESTROY YOUR SKIM COAT with TOUCH UPS!!!😭

welcome back you guys so have you ever destroyed your almost perfect skim coat by trying to fix a couple of little things now just this morning i opened up my email and i got a message from somebody who's going through just that so i'm going to read this to you guys and then we're gonna head out to the garage because i've been procrastinating i'm finishing it so i have the perfect opportunity to show you guys exactly how to cause the problem how to avoid the problem and how to solve the problem okay so steven from victoria writes i watched your video today about installing drywall board backwards i was very interested in your comment about compressing the final top coats and how this creates a hard layer over a soft layer i keep running into this problem and it drives me nuts while skim coating the whole wall when i try to do spot repairs i have this problem i end up with subtle ridges from different layers i definitely experienced this in the early days of learning how to do drywall finishing he describes it almost like a contour map do you guys get what i mean there's these little raised ridges all over the place it's very subtle but when a light goes down the wall it looks horrific sometimes i have to re-skim the whole wall again to solve the problem and if that needs repairs well things get worse instead of better so yes that's true and i think what's going on here is he's continuing to recreate the same situation that caused the problem now the solution is that you do have to re-skim the whole wall and if there's touch-ups after that you have to do it after primer anyways um all of this is kind of just talking why don't we get into the garage and actually see how to avoid or solve the problem so right here we have the three patch wall the one where i showed you guys how not to coat drywall so i ended up giving it a sand and one more coat normally that would be good enough but when i shine my light on the wall i can see that there's a bit of a ridge there and so i just want to give it one more coat running my trowel horizontal instead of vertical like i usually do to just get rid of that but before i do that i'm going to sand this wall as close as i can get to perfection and then we're going to put some touch-ups on here and see how we cause that ridging mistake so usually i get really good results with the festool i think i need to change the sanding pad today because i was left with a bunch of little grooves so we can clearly see these lines right here because of the skylight above me shining the light down if i don't do anything about that guaranteed it's going to show through the paint so let's suppose that that's the only part of the wall that needs any touch-ups now 99 of people that are new to drywall but maybe have a little experience are going to do this so what they will do is they will put the material on and then because they don't want to do a whole bunch of sanding what they'll do is they'll wipe it off really hard so let's do a few spots so we can really see this whole layering thing in action so what we need to know is when you wipe the mud on to your sanded coat and you compress the mud by pushing really hard like a skim coat you're making this mud right here way harder than the surrounding mud so we'll see what happens when we come back to sand maybe let's do another one right here so they're all kind of close together and people do this the reason they do this is because they think well i don't want to sand a lot it's got to be flat so they wipe it super tight thinking that they're going to have to sand very little now we should do a third one i think maybe right here oh sorry a fourth one now on this one what i'm going to do is i'm not going to be wiping it so hard so hopefully i don't get a bunch of bubbles that'll kind of mess it up but on this one i'm actually going to be leaving it built up a little bit i'm not wiping those edges hard maybe i'll get you guys a little bit closer so on this one i'm going to start again a little bit and get a little bit higher up but i'm being very careful to not swipe super hard and let any of these edges get compressed i'm just kind of letting it float over top none of that mud's getting compressed this is probably still going to cause me a problem but normally i would do this on unsanded drywall mud so these little spots are dry now and i'm now going to show you the best and worst way to try to sand a touch up on an already sanded wall okay you guys this lighting's impossible and it's super hard to show but here is the smooth part of the touch up and here is the previously sanded surface and the worst way to sand it is with a sanding sponge right here we can see that that's just not wanting to sand away some parts of it did okay but right here is just not going away it's a lot better but it's still just kind of there what do you say we try this big ugly one let's see what we can do there guys i'm actually having a hard time screwing this up okay this one's getting it let's zoom in a little right there so on top we can see the smooth compressed mud and then we can see the stuff that's sanding easier so this is the kind of ridges that we're talking about well this is a little bit annoying to me because like one it's really hard to register on film and two i know that this problem is not as severe as it is when you guys are experiencing it and like i did in the beginning of my career so let's troubleshoot a few of the things that could really amplify this problem so one of the reasons it's not really bad is i'm using the exact same mud like it's actually the same mix so it's the same consistency if say your touch-up mud is thicker or it's like a different type of mud so this is topping and i'm also doing my touch up with topping but let's say you did your final coat with topping but then you did your touch-ups with all-purpose or even worse some sort of painter's spackle that's like the biggest no-no you can do is to take paint or spackle because it's way harder to sand than drywall mud so if you're touching up with that sort of stuff it's going to be a nightmare it's literally going to leave islands on your wall where all your touch-ups are but again yeah i'm just i'm not really struggling here because i'm using both of the same types of muds and the little bits that i'm getting would show on a super well-lit wall like say if you had a raking sunset glancing across the wall but generally no it's not a big problem getting back to one of the reasons that this can happen pretty badly is sanding with a sanding sponge doesn't work well because the sanding sponge bends and conforms to the wall and to the pressure you put on it with your hand so when you're trying to grind out those little ridges what's happening is you're just digging out the softer material even more and i think i was doing kind of a bad job sanding because i was holding the sanding sponge really flat like i do all of this stuff instinctually so it actually makes it hard for me to mess this up but yes grinding away at that edge with the sanding sponge and like pushing hard on it that's for sure gonna hollow out the softer mud faster my preferred tool to use for sanding touch-ups is just a regular old pole sander because it's nice and flat and it spreads the weight out evenly so even if your muds are a little bit different in texture and consistency they're both going to stand kind of the same so let let's get to this one last ridge that i left and this is the mud that i didn't compress i'm going to sand that with a pole sander and we'll see how it looks i'm starting with the pressure so the actual this part of the pole i'm not letting this part of the pole go past here very much because as soon as this goes past here it's going to put pressure on the less strong mud so i'm standing here to keep it really flat and it's almost totally gone [Music] needs a little bit this way to get rid of a bit of a line right here that's probably hard to see but that's almost 100 gone it's still not perfect though like right here here's the soft mud here's the harder mud but on almost any wall this is going to be more than good enough all right let's get back to some of the solutions so you did your final coat you sanded everything then you did your touch-ups before painting tried to sand them and you wound up with ridges all over the place what do you do now so unfortunately the only actual solution is to skim the whole thing again you're never going to get rid of those ridges of super compressed mud if you're actually having like a serious problem unlike the little ones that i did here now how you can avoid this in the future is don't do touch-ups on sanded mud ever so before you go around and do your final sand if you see any spots that you can tell are going to need to be touched up touch them up then with a light hand so that you're not compressing the mud and then when you come back with the sanding pole and do your final sand it should stand right out that's how i usually do it but alternatively the other thing you can do is just make sure you do all your touch-ups after you prime it so sand it out prime everything and then start doing touch-ups that's going to be the most foolproof method for most people the only thing you want to make sure of is that like your walls need to be flat enough before priming and it should just be small deficiencies like scratches nicks and dings porosity like little bubbles and stuff that stuff can all be fixed really easily after priming what you don't want to be fixing after priming is lumpy uneven walls like at that point you just didn't actually do a good enough job floating and sanding and then you know all that stuff like you didn't make flat walls it's got to be flat before you prime anyways i need to get to skimming this whole wall and then i'm going to show you guys how i like to touch up things before sanding and i have the perfect spot right here where there seems to be either a blister or some delaminated mud something's going on right here so i'm going to carve it out a little bit and we'll touch that up later because it's not going to be totally flush after my skim coat and now you guys as much as i would love to keep the camera rolling and show you all the skin coding and stuff we've got enough videos about that and i do like to try to stay on topic you may notice that i'm going horizontal today and like i said i just felt like because i did two passes vertically that it wasn't quite flat enough and because all of the light in this place shines down it really shows it if it's not totally flat on a horizontal plane whereas in most cases you usually just have light coming from the side showing if you have stuff that's not even on the vertical plane anyways that's why i'm going to be skim coating this whole thing horizontally this time [Applause] just to give it [Applause] that extra extra little bit oh and getting back to one of my favorite comments recently was it was from the mesh tape can you patch with mesh tape and all-purpose video somebody goes ben that was so extra of you to sand that little patch with the festool yes it was very extra of me anyways at the risk of having too much extra footage in this video i'm gonna cut to tomorrow when i'm sanding and painting this i just actually thought of one more thing remember that little touch-up that little bit that i ground out with my knife i'm actually gonna do that right now as we can see it's already shrunk now the mud's just dry enough that i can kind of touch it up so what i'm going to do is i'm going to get just a little bit of mud on the corner of my blade and now i'm just going to really carefully and people might think i'm insane to leave a blob of mud like this on my wall but it's not compressed this mud here wasn't compressed it's going to sand at exactly the same rate so you kind of have a couple of choices you can either do it like i did when it was still just mostly dry or you can wait for it to actually be dry and then do a touch-up but this is generally how i do touch-ups i kind of lump it on not usually this big the only reason it's that thick is because it needs to be thick so that it can actually shrink and when i sand it flat it ends up all flat because otherwise if i wiped it flat on here and i came back and sanded i would still have an indent when it finished shrinking so this is to account for shrinkage but if it was something more just like scratches i definitely wouldn't have lumped it on like this i would have wiped it on a little more gently and a little thinner but again being careful not to compress the mud okay you guys this has had a chance to dry overnight we got my little blob right here which is totally dry and just to prove a point and show you guys how i normally touch stuff up because this is when i catch it while the wall is still wet and if it's a little bit deeper but let's say we just have an annoying little scratch ah no why are you doing that to the wall oh i think i could probably sand those out let's there we go that's pretty bad okay so let's just give this a little mud so this is like this let's say you catch something on sanding day we're just gonna i can even feather a little bit it's not a big deal all right that should be enough and i'm just gently feathering the edges trying hard not to compress the mud i'm just going to leave that that's good enough so i'm now going to have lunch and coffee to give this enough time to dry off because usually when i do this like i'll go look through some rooms i'll start touching up some stuff and honestly within about half an hour usually something like this is dry enough to sand so that's why i don't usually find it too hard to do basic touch-ups on sanding day almost dry i had coffee and lunch but wasn't quite long enough but it will be in about 10 more seconds okay let's check these out and see if we can sand them real nice without being able to see it through paint so i have here some 180 grit sandpaper foam back sandpaper nice fresh new pad this is going to do a real good job all right this should be pretty obvious i mean there's our lines right hopefully it can be seen the horizontal ones are easier to see because of the lighting [Music] [Music] as we can see it sands away like nothing was ever there at all and we got a pretty smooth skim coat in general here that i need to sand there's not much to see the further back you step the less there is i better get to sanding this whole wall i'm gonna roll some paint on it and then we'll take one more look at it and i don't think there's gonna be anything to see i'm pretty sure i have completely covered the how not to touch up and how to touch up you know just all of it like that's it anyways sanding time going real slow today and yes yes i'll do dust protection once i turn the camera [Music] so [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you guys this is finally done i'm really happy about this because i had been procrastinating forever and i was like in the middle of a really long edit that i didn't think i was going to get ready for a weekly upload and then i got that email asking about the touch-up question so let's take a look at this wall i mean honestly i can't even find those spots i touched up anymore but let's let's see if we can find anything okay so let's get a nice close look at this right now i'm about five feet away there's really nothing to see shadows are doing some interesting things but let's check out that texture so as we can see there's nothing and i can't even find the actual spot where i did those touch-ups i think it was around here like if we take a real up close look i'm about six inches away i'm trying to move really slow so that you can actually scope it out there's just nothing i'm sure they were somewhere in this two foot vicinity that i was checking it's just not here so i think it's worth really quickly recapping what to do so you don't make those mistakes with touch-ups okay so first of all never ever try to touch up sanded mud like if there's one rule i just wouldn't ever do that make sure you prime it before you try touching it up second if you're going to touch it up before priming make sure you do it before sanding use a light touch make sure you're using the same kind of mud and let's get into those details a little bit more so you might even want to make sure that that mud is thinned down a little bit more than the stuff you put on the wall because the more you thin down mud the easier it is to sand so that will help ensure that the mud you put on top is going to be a little bit softer or you could even go a further length and if you used all purpose on your wall you could then touch up with something like topping mud if you have the option to but generally speaking just thinning your touch up mud down a little bit more than what you had to work with on the wall is going to help out third make sure whatever you sand with is nice and flat and those foam-backed sanding pads i mean it really doesn't get any better than that so if you're getting a ridge and you're trying to grind it away with a sanding sponge it's only going to get worse just stop and re-skim the wall it's time to do that if you've gotten that far anyways you guys that's it like that is you know all of the nuances i can think about when it comes to touching up drywall i know some people will probably be talking about ben what about adding um tint to your mud so like blue chalk now i'm not a big fan of that i think there's a risk that it might make it actually ridge a little bit more because i the worst ridging i've seen has been from crews that used blue tint in their mud now that could just be that they didn't actually know the nuances of how to touch up because a lot of people don't so i believe that is finally it and this wall is finally done i can put my gym back together i'm really excited about this you guys may be wondering why i'm fussing so much about a wall in my garage and it's because this wall is so well lit and when i'm lifting weights i want to make sure that i'm not looking at things that distract me so i'm facing here and i don't see any work that needs to be done there's nothing that's saying like oh that should be sanded oh that should have been repainted oh there's a blister there there's a nail pop there like i need to be in order to be zen what i'm working on i need some pretty decent conditions i need a nice space so that's why i have fussed so much on this side i know it seems like overkill and if i was truly zen i'd be able to handle it in whatever condition it was but i guess i'm not anyways thanks for watching vancouver carpenter i really hope you got a lot out of this video i want to say thanks to steven for the inspiration to this video i hope it helps a lot of you and you guys i hope your project is going really well but i hope you're doing even better thanks for watching till the next video

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 154,992

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: 2p3lG_gXMdg

Length: 24min 36sec (1476 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2022