HOW TO SAND DRYWALL!!!

hello and welcome to Vancouver carpenter today we are gonna talk about everybody's favorite topic sanding drywall so the very basics of what you're gonna need for sanding drywall are a mask a decent sanding sponge a sanding pole and I usually like something like a four inch knife so first let's get into the sanding poles so I think it's well worth your time to try and find a decent sanding pole this one is the better than ever super sander you're only gonna find this at drywall supply stores what you don't want if you can avoid it is one of these crappy plastic drywall Sanders if that's all you can get sure go ahead but they don't articulate as nicely and they have a tendency to flip a lot so I definitely recommend looking for one that's metal that has a better swiveling action than these plastic ones so next you're gonna want some sandpaper and I don't just rip it off of a sheet so these are actually special sand papers that are made to attach to a sanding pole and you can find these at most paint places hardware stores so this is my first coat and I'm gonna be sanding with hundred grit which is pretty aggressive for a lot of people I might recommend actually going to 120 for my first coat I just like a cheap piece of sandpaper that gets burned up and thrown out after the first coat and also let's take a quick look at this sanding pad so this has a nice flat surface I'd like it to be flat because when sanding my first coat I want this to sort of plane down the drywall if you're using a foam back sandpaper on your first coat it's gonna ride over the bumps and not level them out so let's take a look at the kind of things we're looking at to sand on our first coat so what we are looking at here is a lift off that's when I pull up with my trowel and I lift it off the wall and it leaves these ridges or lines so this is what your first coat should have in it is a bunch of liftoffs like this and when sanding these I usually like to go with the lift off like so and so now it was really quickly sanded down and it's nice and smooth so now let's get to the whole wall so when you've got a bigger wall like this and you've got all your lift offs and it's your first coat you don't need just be sanding the bejesus out of everything like we're not trying to take everything down we're just trying to take the high spots down if you've got low spots you don't want to be over sanding trying to make everything smooth that's part of the whole point of having this firm pad and the thin paper is just to take down all the high spots so I'm going to quickly sand this wall so as you can see it was a pretty quick sand there wasn't a lot I needed to do and I usually don't sponge anything at this point and I also don't sand my corners corners should only take one coat over top of tape so you shouldn't be sanding those until you're finished sinned otherwise you're gonna be scratching them up however I do find that sometimes I do need to detail some things up to make sure that they're gonna coat really nicely on the next coat you know you can also spray things away and level it out that way a little bit but it doesn't flatten it out quite as nicely as sanding so your next coat will go better if you detail some of those little things in the corners you know and again I don't mean sand the corners but I mean it's hard to get your sanding pole right up into the corner so sometimes it just needs a little bit of work before your next coat another thing that helps tremendously is to have a nice bright light and shine it directly down the wall that way you can see where you still need to sand and when to stop sanding and let me show you something this is where to stop sanding if at any point you see your tape coming through the stop sanding immediately it means it hasn't been built out enough in the surrounding area so first let's go over some basics in sanding form so it doesn't matter which way you feel like sanding so much as its horizontal up and down diagonal I mean like I said though it's important that you sand with your liftoffs to plane them down and to flatten that joint off so you want to sand in the direction of your liftoff but what I'm really talking about is the form the way you sand with a sanding pole so you never want to go like this with the pole perpendicular to the head like that because what's gonna happen is it's gonna flip on you especially if you're using one of those cheap sand and people however you also don't want to go the opposite which is totally parallel with the sanding head because what can happen is the sharp edges of the pad can actually leave deep grooves in your mud like these so the best way to send is with your pole at just a slight angle to the sanding head so kind of like this and that does two things one it stops the straight-line of the sanding head from leaving those deep gouges and two it actually also increases your sanding surface so you're actually going to be a little bit more efficient too so always trying keep it tilted just a little bit and it's not like a 45 degree angle it's about like a 10 to 20 degree angle just a little bit so that's first coat so I'm gonna coat everything in here and then we're gonna film the finish coat sanding tomorrow okay so this is now finished coated and ready to send so for sanding this coat what I really like to use is some foam backed sandpaper so this stuff comes in a roll it's 180 grit even says it right there and actually I find this 180 can be a little bit too non abrasive I like 150 burned down a bit but we're getting a bit technical here so the order of how I like to send this is important because this is what's going to make sure that you don't miss stuff so first off if you have a light turn it on the reason for that okay plugging it it helps - there we go so the reason let's get right up close here about having a light when you're sanding can you see these liftoffs and everything so when I'm sanding and I have the light shining down the wall and I can see it this well I'm able to figure out exactly how much I need to sand couple passes their toughest passes here and I can just keep moving on and I don't spend any more time sanding that I need to when I don't have the luxury of having a light what I find is I easily spend 50% more time sanding because I'm just being really thorough to make sure I got everything and in this case I have to do the absolute minimum sanding I need to so let's get back to the system of sanding that I was about to get into so I have a system and what I like to do is I always start in the corners so I burned my edge down and I get as close into the corner as I can so I'm maybe a half an inch to an inch away and you really want to be careful not to bang into the corners that's where you see all these nice little dents in the corners when people are doing that so I'm gonna go into my corner right here same thing stay away from the corner so right now I'm really gonna focus on the edge that's the first thing I always do is burn the edge down and it usually takes just one pass like that and so now I'm gonna go right into all of this staying just as far away as I can and then I'm gonna keep going we're gonna do the whole perimeter getting as close as I can so I'm actually going to quickly put my mask on because I do fill them with a mask and our filmer neck is going to put his tradesman special mask on highly effective okay so I've done my corner and now I'm gonna go over all of this which is way more sanding than a regular joint maybe actually let's go into the hallway where we have a really easy joint to save it because this is gonna take forever to film I'm gonna do my corners we're just gonna do this one wall real quick [Music] [Music] yeah still shining but I get my ball back got it so we're gonna get the end and the inside stop the earth if I ran out of floor here's a little tip if you're in a hallway what I usually like to do because usually the other side of the hallway is gonna be a finished wall I put my hand like this because you're gonna be way less likely to damage the wall and you're gonna try not to hurt your hand which is gonna help you not dent the wall Edge's that soon your screws should not need much just a couple pushes on each one [Music] [Music] okay so that's how you quickly sand a wall here I'd like to go around the perimeter and then I work my way down the joints and then I do my screws so now that you've seen how I like to do the wall perimeter working my way down to the joints down to the screws what I'm going to do is I'm gonna sand this whole wall which we're not gonna film the whole thing because that is boring as sin but once I'm done that I'm gonna show you how I do the angles ah very quickly let me explain why I like to do the edge first so if I sand everything nicely and then push really hard to burn down the edge what will happen is I'm gonna scratch the bulk of the surface so when I sand the edge I actually push super hard to get rid of it like that and what that's gonna do is it's gonna scratch in here a little bit so next I sand gently into the joint like so with a light so I can see it all you get an idea of how this gets done to the edge work your way in and don't push hard on all this the harder you push the more you're gonna scratch it make sure you can see it with your light so that you know what you're actually doing okay so examining corners now so I like to use these sponges the ones with the angle on them on one side and I really don't like to sand with anything other than these the other thing I do is I like to tear away this little edge so I just tear at it you know sort of like when one of my kids is being destructive and picking it something just tear that away so sanding corners so we've already done the edge and it's ended up as close as I could get so now it's just simply a few quick pushes and that generally takes care of it and so if there's the reason I tear this bit off is because what that does is it stops it from leaving a sharp line so if you've ever seen a super sharp line one inch away from the corner it's probably somebody sanding sponge and then so it's a couple of quick passes usually and depending on how you've coated it it could be more but I'll give it a couple of quick passes to crisp up that corner I find when I coat it by hand they sound so easily I get into the corner here I'm gonna do a couple right here and if you want a video about how to do 3-way corners really well I have one of those already I will link it in the description below but yes just a couple of quick classes here and now is the point where this comes in so if there's anything I see that I still want to tune up that's where I start to put pressure with my fingers on this edge of the sponge and I just so see if you can see that right there can you yep okay so something like that I'm now gonna put a little bit more pressure on that spot to try and make it disappear and it's really good to sand with a light some people will carry a trouble light so a handheld lamp some sort of light in their hand while they're sanding and they're gonna look for everything like that and that's why I love these angled sponges because you can really nicely get in there without damaging the other side and you also gonna watch out for right here I've left a sanding sponge with lines so you've got a feel for those or look for those and just a quick pass will usually take care of it so again we're going back up here I've got that in the corner and this is a brand-new sponge so it's leaving little lines here because it's so firm so I'm gonna quickly do that this doesn't look quite right so I'm gonna give it just a little bit more attention with that angled side up here I can see I've left one of those lines again so I'm gonna pass really quick like that corners really make or break your job so you want to do a nice job and then I know I've left the line so it's good like that and that's usually done and if I see anything that you do more work and what I'm doing here is I'm putting my fingers under here like so to hold the sponge up and I'm also trying to keep this corner off the wall as I detail with that angle bit see how I'm doing that so that way I'm not leaving a sharp line right here which will take another couple of passes to fix although I usually use corner tools and my corner tool is actually leave a corner that is about the same width or even a bit narrower so I don't leave that sanding sponge with lime anyways that's a whole different story so the next step is to do all of your detail sanding so all of the spots that your pole sander couldn't get into or any of the scratches that you may have left from pole sanding so it's just quite simply getting into all the corners and getting everything nice and leveled out and again you're still gonna want to be careful that you're not leaving lines or new gouges from sanding [Music] so it can be a fair bit of work the detail sanding can sometimes take the longest well thanks for watching Vancouver carpenter that's all I can tell you about sand and drywall anyways I hope you found this useful I hope this makes your next sanding project go way better and your finished product much nicer so until the next video

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 276,866

Rating: 4.9215684 out of 5

Keywords: drywall, sand, sanding, patch, fix, hole, damage, tape, corner, bead, wall, ceiling, fill, spackle, remodel, repair, install, taping, mudding, plaster, gyproc, gyprock, board, wallboard, mesh, mesh tape, dry, paint, painting, joint, screw, nail

Id: imoKbJnHbKE

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 06 2019