Skim Coating is Overused & OFTEN Not Needed

hey welcome to skim coating 101 i'm going to teach you all you need to know about skim coating including what it is how to use it different ways to do it when it's needed and when it's not along with more information right after this [Music] hey my name is guy persolla i'm a 35-year drywall professional and i'm here to pass on my tips tricks and knowledge to you guys so if you like learning this kind of stuff be sure and click that subscribe button and if you click the bell icon you'll get notified each time we put out a new video we're going to put out a lot of them for you there's also a lot of good information in the description down below you just click that show more check it out now why did i decide to put this video out well it's because one of the common questions i get on my videos is about do i need to skim coat this at this stage do i need to skim coat that and i can tell there's a lot of confusion out there especially among your novices now i might teach some of you pros a few tricks too so stick around got a lot of good information here but first of all let's cover what is skim coating now there's i see some people on different youtube channels and i can tell there's different terminology everywhere you go and sometimes people use this the term skim coating a little more loosely than i do i grew up doing this and when we talked about skim coating we were talking about putting a thin coat of mud over an entire surface like an entire wall a ceiling etc and if not the entire surface we were coating something pretty big now now there's times when we did put it on kind of thick like if you're trying to cover up popcorn ceiling or something you're still doing the same basic procedure as a skim coating just a little thicker so they all kind of roll into one generally though skim coating is a thin layer of mud over an entire surface now the purpose is to fix a lot of minor defects if you have that or most commonly in drywall it's used to leave a level five smooth finish because if you just finish drywall like normal like this picture here and you sand it touch it up get it as smooth as you can and then you paint it it will not be a level five that'll be about a level four and what will happen is you'll see the nap of the paper come through the drywall mud will be smoother and look different so in order to get it to all be the same you've got to put a really thin layer of mud on it and that just kind of evens out that porosity takes away some of the nap of the paper now the painter can help with that by rolling it with a little bit of stipple but sometimes people don't want any stipple so two or three coats of paint helps too but where i see it being used a little more loosely is things like i just coated this joint now it's all done i'm going to skim coat it meaning in that case they're talking about just putting a really thin coat over just that joint so for the purpose of the this video we're going to be talking about covering whole surfaces because to me coating a joint whether it's thin or thick is just coating a joint and i think that's where some of the confusion comes in so let me explain a few things we're going to teach you i'm going to teach you when it's necessary when it's not and why a lot of you are using skim coating wrong okay first off there's several ways you can do skim coating i've showed several ways in my videos like one method is you can roll mud on and you can roll it on medium thick to thin and then you just smooth that out you can smooth it out with things like a pull trowel a pan and a knife just a regular knife and yeah this one's kind of slightly rusty or you can use one of these rubber blades like this one i'm going to put a link to all this stuff in the description down below for you novices that haven't done this a lot this is the most forgiving these metal blades they're a lot harder to get smooth you'll leave more edges this thing because it's rubber it tends to float around it just doesn't leave as much of a edge out here and so i recommend that for you guys now the disadvantage this is it doesn't leave it quite as flat because as you can see it's pretty flexible whereas you can see with these they do have some flexibility like so but not very much so that's where it'll get you guys that aren't very good at running knives you'll get more edges okay rolling it on is one way you can also just put it in your pan and you can just simply take and spread it on you can put it on pretty thick that way that i use that method by far the most often because i can get it on just about as fast as i could roll it probably faster actually and i can get it on smooth and i level things out better so these steel knives they tend to fill in the little voids better whereas the rubber blade it will tend to follow those better so you get a little flatter smooth finish or skim coating out of it and it's just what i grew up doing so i like using this way now in one of my videos i showed how you can put it on heavy like this and then followed up with a big 24 inch or even 36 to 48 inch skim coating blade i showed that in two different videos one where i did it on the ceiling and it worked really good another where i just did it here in my studio showing you how we got rid of a complete heavy orange pill by skim coating it now in that case we skim coated it heavy so that's the two most common ways now drywall pros if you're doing like a hospital or something often they'll take a big airless paint sprayer and it takes a big one that they cost about five thousand dollars and they will just thin the mud down and you can spray the drywall mud on now of course the advantage is speed and you get it on really smooth because you really don't have to hit it with a knife you're just trying to get that thin coat of mud then after your mud dries on a skim coat you sand it with like 220 grit just enough to knock down those remaining defects and if you did it by any method other than the airless and even with the airless you're gonna have some defects but you're gonna still need to go through look for any final tiny defects if you're doing level five fix those sand them then you're really done so now that's where i think a lot of you are confused about skim coating i hear a lot of times when you say i sanded i scraped all the popcorn off my ceiling should i skim coat it now and sand it and paint it well honestly if you do that ninety percent of the time it's going to look not so great because normally there's some bigger defects that you need to fix i'm going to show you some examples of things that you really shouldn't use skim coating for here is after scraping a popcorn ceiling we obviously have a big crack even if you put mesh tape over this you can't just skim coat over it you need to repair it right and then in this example it's not a big crack but you see these coarse edges here and the pop nails you might as well just fix these by their self and not skim coat the whole ceiling just to fix all these little defects and after scraping a popcorn ceiling often you'll see joints that don't look so good like this and yes coating the whole ceiling would probably take care of this but you're just going to too much work when all you need to do is just coat this joint like normal here's some others you should just fix one at a time instead of skim coating the whole wall or ceiling so like this bad defect here or bubbles just fix them as you go these edges like this you can just put a coat of mud down the edge and this was a really bad repair someone did and if you tried to skim coat over this it would still probably pop through so just float it out and fix it like normal now here's an example of one you should skim coat this is actually one where i got hired to do some repairs on a job but i saw that they had scraped the popcorn off and then just painted it and you see how uneven it is and looks pretty terrible you can't just spot repair anything so you scrape it sand it and skim coat it and then you can return it back to a like new surface or in this case i did a video about how you can get rid of ugly textures a lot of you don't like the texture you have well you can skim coat over it sand it smooth and and then leave it smooth or do what you want with a new texture that's one of the big misconceptions here is you don't need to skim coat everything i how often do i skim coat i would say when i'm busy and working i might skim coat once every six months really it's that rare i only use skim coating primarily for level five smooth finish or getting rid of a texture so i can do a different texture so that can include getting rid of popcorn or like in this case getting rid of the orange peel and there was one case where i skim coated after popcorn in all my years i've removed hundreds of popcorn ceilings i've only skim coated one so you really don't need to and the reason i did that it's because the homeowners wanted to scrape their own ceiling and i told them i looked the job ahead of time i told them it's probably not going to scrape it been painted too much and i suggested we consider something else they were flipping the house they didn't care if it took them a little while so two of them got in there and scraped it and they had to go down to like four inch putty knives not really mud knives and those will do a lot of damage and sure enough they did there was torn brown paper about every foot all through a 1200 square foot house so i told them they had to apply this rx35 pro 999 to the whole ceiling and they wanted to be safe so they put two coats on and then i came in and skim coated the whole ceiling sanded it and it looked great because we were only feeling the depth of the torn paper so it was thin enough i could skim coat it a little bit heavier and sand it down with my power sander and we were going to texture it anyway so i didn't have to worry about sand scratches and in that case it worked so do you need to skim coat repairs and popcorn ceilings and all these things that you guys are doing 99 of the time no now it might be helpful if you feel like you're just not getting those little edges in that for some reason it could be helpful but i think you're really wasting a lot of time and materials skim coating too much okay now i know some of my viewers have mentioned that sometimes you skim coat a repair to make it easier to blend the texture that way you don't have to blend the texture you just got to get it close now hey agent 47 if you're watching this i'm going to put out a video one day showing how to effectively blend knockdown because it is one of the trickiest ones but you can see in this example here where on the right hand side i sprayed a little bit heavier because on the top it was a little bit heavier and i got it to match without that smeary edge around the side and the same on the left now there's some tricks to that so be watching for that video one day now as far as what is the easiest way to do the skim coating well it's this roller method for you guys because all you got to do is roll it on and smooth it out somehow like i say this works really well i'm not a big fan of it because it leaves it slightly coarser a metal blade just leaves it butter smooth this leaves a slight coarseness but if you're going to sand the whole thing it's really not that big of a deal and you can put these on extension poles and run them up on the ceiling walls etc and they do have different widths of these and again i'll put a link to it in the description you just go to amazon check what width you want they're not that expensive either hey did i answer all your questions because if i didn't comment down below i'm really good about answering questions if it gets to be a long drawn-out question or multiple questions i ask that you go to patreon and ask them there as a member i can answer the short ones but my time is valuable i hope you help support what we do here teaching you guys by joining us on patreon as a member we have levels as low as three dollars and your support really helps us go full time teach you guys a lot more and i appreciate it so if you have any questions ask them in the comments down below if not i thank you guys for stopping by be sure and click this subscribe button and the bell icon and i will see you guys on the next video take care everybody

Channel: That Kilted Guy DIY Home Improvement

Views: 187,240

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Id: xK-Vx_ptgHg

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Sun May 10 2020