HOW TO TAPE AND MUD BUTT JOINTS (pre-fill)

today in this video i'm going to go over how to properly prep mud and tape this butt joint all right so this is a butt joint and it's called a butt joint because it's two cut edges right here that meet together versus factory edges which have a little dip and you can actually mud and tape right over the top of it and run it smooth so what we need to do actually to mud this mud and tape this is we need to first we need to prep it and the way we're going to prep it is we're going to cut we're just going to take our knife here and we're going to cut about a 45 degree angle in there now as you can see i've cut about a 45 on both sides of this right as you look at the top middle down at the bottom all right so now that we got our drywall prepped we're going to go ahead and do what's called a pre-fill now for the pre-fill we're going to use a quick set mud they usually come in a powder form so you're actually going to have to mix it but the idea is that this will actually set up and not shrink as much whereas an all-purpose will actually shrink a little bit um and that's why we don't want to use it in the pre-fill because it will crack um potentially and it will it'll it'll you'll see the bubbles and stuff so like i said we're going to use a quick set today i'm using some easy sand 45 now this means that it will take 45 minutes to set up and at that point i can go ahead and tape it it still needs a full 24 hours to dry but at least once it's set up i can go ahead and put my tape over the top all right so now that i've got her mixed i'm just going to take my six inch knife here and fill in my joint until it tightens going to scrape off as much excess as i can all right so as you can see here our goal really is just to fill this gap up with mud we're not trying to feather it in either direction we actually want to clean up as much as we can on the sides but the idea is that we can just come back once this sets up whether it's 45 minutes 90 minutes whatever it is and we can just apply our tape all right so i actually ended up letting this sit overnight um i could have come back after about 45 minutes um to actually put the second coat on but i ran into a few other things that i had to take care of but essentially what you're looking for um is just to make sure this is set up and usually um once if you touch it and it doesn't dimple in or it doesn't leave a mark that usually means it's ready to you know actually you can actually it's set up and you can actually put the next coat on um but it's not going to look dry unnecessarily it may actually still look kind of wet and darker but as long as like i said it doesn't dimple in or it doesn't leave a mark after you touch it you're fine to go ahead and do the next coat all right so there are a few other things that will actually affect your setup time one being of course the thickness of the mud you put on so this was a larger gap and it actually took more like an hour to set up versus the 45 minutes that is set on the bag the temperature the water that you use to mix the mud can also have an effect so if you use hotter water it will set up faster and of course the temperature around you right so if it's 80 degrees in the room um it's going to set up a little faster versus if it's 45 or 50 degrees in the room so those are just things you might want to think about all right so the next step is just to take this um now i'm using just an all-purpose mud that i picked up at the local hardware store and then i put a little water into it so it will kind of drip off i want it pretty thin when i actually start putting tape on but we're just going to go ahead and get this taped and we'll start by just putting some mud on here all right so now you can start pretty much the top or the bottom putting your tape down i'm going to start at the top usually because that bottom gets hidden um but you want to make sure that your where you fold the fold creased in the middle um is going to go towards the wall and not away from the wall as it could as it will bubble possibly over time so you want to make sure that crease is going towards the wall i'll get a little mark up there where my actual joint is at now let's go down to my bottom here i'm just going to take this tear that off all right so next i like to go to about the middle of the wall put this down there and then i'm going to go down and squeeze that down i'm also going to go up with it pull it tight i'm gonna clean up any excess i have on the sides as well okay all right so another thing you could have done is you could have just applied the tape directly the kwikset mud um instead of doing this in two steps you would only done in one step the reason i chose not to do it that way is because there was a larger gap back there and i wanted to make sure i had that gap filled in with quick set mud before i applied the tape but that is a way you could have gone i don't really recommend it for larger um gaps again i want to make sure that mud back in there is set up and isn't going to crack on me so that would be an option all right so at this point our next step would be to just let this dry for about 24 hours then we'll come back apply a second and third coat and feather this out and get it flush with our wall but really that's all there is to it if you want to check out my video on how to apply the second and third coat i'll put a link in the description also put a love link above me here um but that's like said that's pretty much all there is to um pre-filling and applying the date alright guys thanks for watching as always if you're not already a subscriber make sure you click that link below and become one and we'll catch you on the next one

Channel: Home Repair Hub

Views: 27,735

Keywords: drywall, drywall taping and mudding, drywall repair, drywall installation, butt joints, how to tape and mud butt joint, how to tape and mud drywall, drywall joints, drywall pre-fill, prefill butt joints, pre-fill drywall joint, Quickset drywall mud, drywall mudding, DIY Home Repair, butt joint

Id: nZzE_L6vaSw

Length: 8min 16sec (496 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021