How to Mud and Tape Drywall - Part 2 of 2 - Mudding and Taping

Hi, I'm Nils and welcome to part two of mudding and taping. If you haven't seen the first video, check it out. There's a link right here. And now we're going to go ahead and move on to the part where we've got the first layer of tape on there and mud on here. We've covered a lot of the screw holes and different things like that. And now we're going to go through and try to even things out. Put another layer of mud on there. We're going to use the all purpose joint compound on this one. Again, it's the stuff in the green box usually or a green lid. And we're just going to try to use the wider 10 or 12 inch knife and spread out some of this. The first step though, is just to clean off some of the excess stuff that we've got. So if you see little spots and spills and bumps and stuff like that, we're going to clean all those off. We're going to go throughout the whole area that we're working in and clean all of that off. Once you're done with that, we put on the dust mask and then grab a sander of some sort. There's lots of different kinds. So I'm going to use one of these guys and just start sanding this down. So we'll show you that as we go. But that's the first step of the second stage. Now that I've got everything cleaned up, it's time to go ahead and start applying a new coat of mud on here. And I've got my trowel all filled with mud. I've got a nice long blade here, a 12 inch in this case, and I'm just going to scoop some on here, get a good coat of it on here, and then just start to smooth out this section. The whole purpose here is try to make areas that are uneven from one board to the other, nice and even. So there's no visible transition going on. That's why these wider blades are really nice. You're going to use a good, good bit of mud if they're off at all like these two pieces are. I've got some definite filling in to do. Just apply as much as you need. It's better to do multiple thin coats than to do one really thick coat. You end up with quite a bit of excess once you start actually putting some pressure on there and getting the stuff off. I'm seeing a little bit of this kind of texturing going on here and I don't mind that too much, especially for right now because when I come back I can send that down and when it comes time to texture, we're going through for a kind of European texture look anyway, so that's okay. I'm going to keep working my way down. All right, as you can see, we have now done stage two of mudding and taping. I've got a pretty well applied, evened out layer on all the mud and I've got some spots where I did the corner here, for example, where there's some dimpling that takes place inside the little holes that are inside the corner piece here. So I'm going to want to hit that with another coat. A lot of times that kind of sucks in on that first coat when it's wet. So the second coach should take care of that nicely. Again, the objective of this code is really just to smooth things out, get any joints or butts that are next to next to each other to be able to be nice and smoothed over. So you can't tell that there's any joints or anything going on that it just looks like it's all one solid piece all around. And so we'll now move on to the next step as soon as this is dry onto coat number three. Welcome back to the next stage here. So now we've got our second coat going. The next step is just to start sanding down some of this so that we can apply our third coat or as many coats as you've needed at this point. I've still got a little bit of the stippling here, so I'm going to do a light coat there. We're going to move away from the all purpose compound and move to the topping compound on this one in the blue lid or the blue box. And I'm just going to start sanding some of this stuff away. Make sure to wear some respiratory protection on this and we'll start just kind of knocking down these corners. This stuff is pretty easy to come off. And these corners here, I've got a sponge sander that's got kind of an angle shape on both sides so that I can get up into the corners easy enough to really smooth things out. Knocking down any big spots. You can see how quickly I can knock down any rough edges or anything that I've created in the process. So I'm going to go through the bathroom, kind of run through that process and then I'm going to be ready to apply another light coat on here. And this will kind of be my final topping coat to get the wall prepped for the texturing portion of things. So when I finished sanding, I went ahead and grabbed my blade. Again, the nice wide one I've got a 12 inch one here to 8, 10, 12 will do and started using the topping compound to smooth out some of these sections in here that just needed a little final touch on them. Keep in mind that you can still go back and re-sand some of this stuff before you apply the texture, giving it a chance to be nice and smooth so you don't snag or catch on anything. Make sure you get in these corners and everything really well. And so you end up with a nice smooth even corner or something for you to run up and run your texture and your knife up against. Check out my next video. So you can see how we do the texturing on this. We're going for kind of a Euro style texture and hopefully we'll see you there.