How To Mud & Tape Drywall Butt Joints

hi I'm Shannon from host improvements comm and today I'm going to show you how to mud a butt joint so we've got some drywalled walls and a very common situation is where the ends of the sheets butt together there's no bevel or tapered edge on them so they're you know they're just flushed to each other and flush to the rest of the surface of the wall so what we want to do here is basically tape it first and I'm going to show you a series of all the different steps and actually finishing this joint but obviously you're gonna want to let the the joint dry the mud dry in between every coat so it won't appear that way on today's video but we've just got some different bot joints all set up at different stages so so I've got my paper tape I've got it torn or ripped off to the approximate length that I need I've thin my mud out a little wetter than I would normally use for coating and I'm just gonna smear right on that joint liberally by the way just note how the butt joint is screwed the screws are a little closer together about every 16 inches and one screw on every sheet I just thought I'd point that out before I covered it all up did I say 16 inches I meant six inches apart my camera guys telling me I just said 16 so I must have okay so I put a nice liberal amount of mud on there I want to take my paper tape and Center it on that joint just lightly press it in with my fingertips and now I'm just going to take the same knife I'm using a about a three inch knife and I'm gonna hold my tape with one finger just squeeze out the excess at one end I mean the two sides off now I can work my way down for the MER doesn't matter if you start at the top ever more comfortable with so I'm just pushing the Cape against the wall not using a lot of pressure just enough to flatten it out and push some of the excess mud oh you don't want to squeeze it all out I'll just kind of clean it up as I go and very last a little bit here a little short from the floor but the baseboards gonna big deal and I just want to make sure that I didn't leave any little ridges behind like this here so that I don't have to deal with any chunks in my next coats that peel off when I hit them with the trowel so okay so that's the first step we want to tape that if you're using regular mud like this like not a hot mud that dries quickly just regular mud just let that dry overnight or however long it takes and then you can move on to the next step and we'll set up and show you that one okay so here's a joint that's already taped so it's it's had the tape on now what we're gonna do is our next coat for that coat I use a curved trowel I don't know if the camera can see down there you can see that this trowel basically goes like that so what that does is I I basically run one swipe Center right over this this tape and it just builds up the center a little bit because we have no bevel here to try to hide that this transition so it just builds up a little thicker read over the tape and then we feather it out from there and to use this I I usually work with a hawk as well just as easier to manage if you don't have one of these trowels basically on this coat what you'd want to do is take your flat trowel maybe about eight inches wide and just try to build this up to cover the tape you know I mean by build it up I don't mean through an eighth of an inch thick blob of mud over it but you know sixteenth to 1/32 or something like that anyways just so it covers the tape up before I start I'm just gonna take my knife here anywhere where there is a little Ridge of the dried mud or anything just give it a quick little scrape you don't mean to sound it you shouldn't need to just kind of knock off any chunks that were there and load up a little bit of this mud on my Hawk I load up my Hawk and I'm just basically wiping it over this joint like I said and trying to leave it relatively smooth as well so if you using this trial I'm trying to load the center part of the trowel and it'll just naturally work its way out to the edges as I as I work with it so there's some there start down there okay so we've just basically got it roughly on there I cleaned my trowel off on the hawk again and I'm gonna pull right across the whole thing once and just have a look at what I've got you can see how it's covering really well down near the bottom the tape starts to show here a little bit that's pretty common it's it's tough to get it all covered in one shot sometimes I've got a few little air bubbles so I'm just gonna pull one more time and I don't know if you could see the angle I really had on that if this is my wall here the back of the hawk I'm using the trowel on about that much of an angle so I don't know what that is maybe 15 degrees or something like that okay and I'm pretty happy with that we're gonna leave that and we'll move on to the next next coat okay so now for our next coat we're at our next spot here and again I just want to take my putty knife here chip off any little chunks that we're left sticking and that looks pretty good I'm gonna load up some mud now this time I'm using a street our flat trowel and at this point I'm just gonna feather it out a little bit more so this one here the street down the length of it and what I'm basically going to do is about Oh 1/2 or 3/4 of a trowel width on each side of the joint I can just see the joint is about right here okay so I'm just trying to build it up a little bit and taper it out on the outside edges to to nothing so this time I'm gonna load up one side of my trowel to this side just kind of get that edge done now I'm going back to the other side of my trowel okay so I just get some mud on there to work with okay so actually I'm gonna need it anyways so anyways I've got the joint loaded loaded up there now I want to work on tapering out to nothing on the two edges but still leaving a bit of thickness up the middle so I'm just doing that by how I position the the pressure on my trowel so if I'm out here I'm obviously trying to push harder over here than I am in the center and when I'm there I'm doing the opposite so I'm just kind of working that night along on each side so you can see I've made that that patchwork wider as I've gone through each each pass here so we're just like that I'm gonna clean off that a little bit extra we're in there okay so just like that so that was that step now we have one more okay get it completely finished out we're gonna move over there and basically I'm going to what I'm going to do there I'm going to put one I'm using the flat trial again I'm going to put one rate centered over and do pretty much a full width ode on each side of that as well so we'll move over to that one and show you how to do it okay so here we are for what should be our last coat and like I said I'm just feathering it out even more than what we've got here is I'm going to run one up the middle great a boat where the tape is not and then I'm just loading kind of one side of my trowel again to get wider okay so it looks a little goofy right now but I'll end up stealing enough mud off of it as I work it out to fill in the gaps so again it's all about how you're getting the pressure of your trowel so that you can leave a buildup a mud hear a little bit but ending up with nothing out on the odor edges okay so we should be pretty close there again I'm using about that same angle maybe 1015 degrees of the trowel against the wall and that's that's what you should end up with so we ended up with you know good to two-and-a-half trials wide and if it if that still seems like quite a hump maybe you've got a bit of a problem there you can fan it out even wider and so basically what this is doing let me put this down what we're doing by doing this is trying to eliminate once you've painted this joint flashing which means basically the the light reflecting on it shows a bit of a shadow or shows how much of a hump is here so if we can build it out far enough it makes that bump even more a little more gradual I guess would be the right wording so that's not is noticeable and doesn't show up as easy okay so again as in my other drywall videos or mudding videos that you've seen you're trying to leave your your coats as smooth as you can one to eliminate having to sand in between coating and then finally also for your last coat so that you don't have to do as much sanding if you don't have ridges and holes and everything else in there so like said you know build it out as far as you think you need to try not to build this up too much in the center I mean you to build it up enough to hide the tape that's what you're what you're shooting for okay and then just a lights and over that we'll get rid of anything and you can see my sanding drywall video to cover that part okay so hopefully you enjoyed and learn from what I showed you here this is my method of doing it the I'm not saying it's the only method out there but this is how I would do it if you liked the video click the little thumbs up icon there and give us the thumbs up we appreciate that and if you have any questions about this or anything else you can go to our forum on the website the house - improvements comm and there you can post up any questions you have or make make a comment on somebody else's question even and if you have a an actual comment on this you just want to say hey good job or whatever you can post it down below here at YouTube - so thanks a lot for watching and hope you tune in and watch all the rest of our videos as well

Channel: HouseImprovements

Views: 2,095,765

Rating: 4.9134235 out of 5

Keywords: drywall, joints, tape, mud, compound, finish, trowel, sheetrock, gypsum, board, butt, edge, joint, repair, fix, how-to, taper, feather, endjoint, smooth, fill

Id: uuS001pQNzI

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 10 2014