Part 7 - Drywall Mudding from a Beginner - Building a Tiny Office

what's up guys I'm Zach and welcome back to Workshop edits and welcome to episode seven of my tiny office build Series in my backyard in today's episode we are going to be tackling everything drywall mudding drywall finishing taping painting detailing I'll just say up front this was a massive amount of work very timec consuming but this was my building I was incredibly detailed and focused on making everything look as perfect as possible it required a lot of research some special materials so hopefully those who are interested in doing their own drywall in and mudding who are brand new to the skill much like I was learn something along the way let's go ahead and get started sorry if it's a little echoey in here but now that all the dry Walling is done I'm going to do two things the first thing is tackle these gaps up here which is something that has been on my mind for a while but I left all the research until basically right now I knew from the get-go there was no way I was going to be able to get these gaps perfect between the drywall and the shiplap roof that I have and the reason that it's been on my mind is drywall can absorb moisture but I think for the most part like it doesn't expand nearly as much as the wood that it might touch so this Gap is going to have different amounts of movement involved with it my initial thought was just to use something like big stretch culk that could just SP spand that Gap to be totally honest that still like might be a good viable solution and I think that's what I plan to do with these gaps they're a lot smaller in terms of the actual width of the Gap and they're a lot smaller in terms of the distance between the wood and the drywall and overall like you don't have to worry about movement that much when your gaps get that small but there's a product out there that I found and it was so hard to find in Southern California like it didn't exist within like a 100 miles of me at any of the big box doors but the smaller mom and pop stores they've got it they got it for cheaper so let me show you what it is so this product is called trimex peel away lbad and it comes in half inch or 5/8 inch depending on what thickness you are using for drywall the way it works uh it just seems awesome it's perfect is it essentially creates a sharp edge for you so what you'll do and I'll I'll take you up there actually already cut this piece to length so this stuff is made out of vinyl so it cuts easily with just like a pair of snips if you have them or even scissors I would guess you can obviously use a miter saw if you want things to be really quick repeat and I might actually do that just cuz I have quite a few of these but the way it works is this piece will go make sure you guys can see this properly all the way up here against this top Edge and create a nice seal F off straight joint between the top of the ply or the top of the drywall and whatever surface it's coming into contact with I found a bunch of different like DIY articles and professional articles that recommended this specifically for drywall to Wood and exposed beams to make it have that nice clean look so what you'll do is you'll use a spray adhesive there's a very specific one that they make for this that's I guess for probably vinyl plastic they literally don't sell it in California and it doesn't feel like you specifically need that what you really need is just anything that is like a multi-purpose spray adhesive that can stick with plastics and like other materials so I just bought the regular like 3 M77 spray so you can spray it on the back of the piece here then let it tack up for like 10 seconds hold it in place nicely and if you want to then supplement that with like Staples or little nails to really secure it in place you can but you don't have to you then can apply your coats of mud like two or three and sand in between both onto right here and then you know smooth that onto your drywall then you can wait till you know you paint so you've gone through sticking it on your coats of drywall and sanding and painting and then there's a little tiny tab up here that you can peel away and it gives you this really nice clean Edge all while protecting the surface that you are you know going into and then it just gives you a nice clean joint now in my case because there's a slope in the roof and it's probably the case for a lot of people there's going to end up being like a/4 inch Gap that I'm just going to fill with either regular interior paintable white caulk or like Big Stretch Caulk because I'll have this nice joint on all of these to kind of represent the drywall to wood transition and then just seal off that Gap entirely these things are super cheap they come in 10t sections they are like $3 like I can't imagine doing this without these and I'm so glad I was able to find them so I cut this one to length which is going to go all the way up here I'm going to just do a test test off camera to make sure I get the process right and then I'll do one on camera just to like make sure I know what I'm doing and I'm showing the proper installation of it all right so that was literally as easy as could possibly be so let me show you how it works here's what I'm going to do going to measure this distance which is just a little over 10 and 1 half so here's the L strip comes in a big section so I'm just going to take that measurement got my $77 Snips from Harbor Freight just going to make a snip a little over 10 and 1 12 little over 10 and 1/2 and then you can see it just cuts just as easily as any vinyl product thin vinyl product you might have so you go so you got to make sure that you're obviously putting it on correctly the peel away strip is the smaller end on the front here so you want to make sure you're putting your glue on the back so let's do that back side just going to do one pass just two clean passes so I've been giving it like 15 to 20 seconds to sort of um Gunk up and get set in and then let's take you up to the piece I'm going to show you how easy it is I'm literally going to do it one-handed so backside piece goes up there get it up to the top where it needs to go and then just gonna hold it in place let the glue set for like you know 10 15 seconds just kind of push it in in its different places it's a little bit tricky my hand's not big enough to span all of it but I think it's going to be fine super easy so I'm just I already got two of them done I got this is going so fast it's so easy drywalling is so easy I just knocked out the other side too and you can see I actually ended up putting them these gaps for whatever reason let me see if I can zoom in these gaps are just a lot bigger I don't know it's really hard to like score these around post so I ended up using these underneath them it's not necessar on the other side but um it came out really really good that trimex lb terway like super easy to work with and it's hiding all of my mistakes which is awesome so I'm ready to start mudding and I'm trying to just decide like what I do like what stages I do this in because my gaps everywhere are actually really really good and I'm very impressed with like how good I was able to do them with so little butt joints and like in Corners like it's quite good cuz what I read you usually do is like a pre- mudding stage to fill all of these gaps but there like this is the widest Gap and it's like a quarter of an inch there's like nowhere else anywhere in here that has that so like do I even need to do that or just should I do it and take my time and I can't decide if I want to do that or what I could do is use the Big Stretch Caulk that I have and go around all of the joists which I could do also or I could just start mudding all of the El trims that I did that's what I'm going to do okay so next up what I'm going to do thanks for coming with me on my journey I'm not ready to start taping yet so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go around and pre- mud all of my Corners I'm going to pre mud this one butt joint that I have so it's like a smoother surface to start with I'm going to do the first round of mudding on all of the L joints and I guess I should go around and just do mudding on all of the screws as a first first round too and I'll do it also like a pre muding on any of the places where I to do like a little bit of patchwor 24 hours later I can come back sand do my next coat I'll probably finish with caul and last I've never done this before so I'm just sort of figuring out as I go and I don't think there's one right way to do it so I appreciate you guys just listening to my process let's do some mudding there's a million ways to Mud not even going to begin to go into all them there's hot mud there's different setting times there's joint compounds whatever I don't care I bought this stuff it's premixed I read if you are doing taping to avoid swelling you might want to like water it down a little bit but we're not doing that right now so literally I'm just going to get my drywalling trout put some of this crap in here get my various types of putty knuts spry nuts whatever and I'm just I'm just going to go for it we'll see how it goes I don't think I need to tape off anything the other point to pre muding which I'm trying to find an example here but actually I didn't really have much here I'm going to spin you around so this joint right here has some cracking Technically when you pre mud you want to like knock that part out cuz it's damaged and fill it back in with compound cuz you can go back and sand it and make it straight and it's solid and all that kind of stuff however the only places do I have any anywhere there there are no joints I think I checked all of these anywhere where those aren't going to eventually be covered up by baseboard trim within a window or a door or molding that goes around those things so I'm like not even going to bother with that either let's just have some fun let's like make this fun just for a quick descriptor this is allpurpose joint compound it can be used for all codes in the reinforcing and concealing of joints in wallboard construction it could be used for taping finishing Fastener concealment filling corner bead and texturing doesn't say anything about working time one other tip that I got is I'm trying to find one although I did a pretty good job with these screws is if you are putting the compound over your screws and you're finding that they protrude too much oh here's a good one so this screw right here if I mud over it it's sticking out a little bit too much get my screwdriver I was told just take your screwdriver and do a quarter turn if possible okay I might need to use two hands to do it but one quarter turn that will recess or like dimple it in and that way the compound can just go over it so that you know it's more recessed in you so going to do my first lb strip here so I'm just going to nice clean paddle just go all the way it's kind of nice because that strip at the top sort of you know protects the wood I don't have to tape off anything all this off it's kind of tricky because I'm a perfectionist but I think because we're going to do multiple coats of this that's totally fine I just finished doing all of the non joint mudding so all of the screws that are not going to have tape that go over them have been mudded with a first coat so that includes all of the know L strips that I did and around and I'm hoping I can just sand off I'm going to end up like doing a nice clean up of all the wood up top and I know other way did it up here too definitely doing the extra pieces under here is making a big difference and then I did like the pre- mudding on a couple of places like right here at my only butt joint just to start filling that in and I ended up getting rid of some chipped away pieces and you know just all of the areas that don't require tape at least right away or I can kind of do this in pieces it's going to have to be in pieces anyways I filled in that corner cuz that was the only Corner that had kind of like a big gap everything else is like ready to go so now that I'm here I'm going to do taping which I know is going to be like a little bit of a different task so here we go I'm going to start on a very easy simple wall for me never done this before the tips that I read for this are if you are using premixed joint compound so not hot mud a lot of times what happens is you will put your tape on and mud your joint then come back 24 hours later and there are blisters I think it's called swelling or maybe it's called blistering I think it's called blistering and just for what it's worth I'm going to put a video in the description that is like a 2hour video that goes through every possible step for drywalling and it's incredibly helpful and this is where I got all my information from so I'm just giving you a couple of tips because they're applicable to my situation but when that happens it's because you don't get enough mud underneath the tape so there's not enough moisture in there to swell and absorb the tape and wet the tape and that tape then delaminates from the wall so there's two ways to combat that you can add more water to your compound for this first one or you can just make sure that your coverage for mud underneath it is enough so that if you were to peel off the tape the entire piece of tape would be covered with mud so I'm just going to overuse the compound underneath because what's going to eventually happen is we'll stick on the tape and we will squeeze out the mud behind it just so that it ends up like running flat here um to the point where you're better to over coverage and use more compound cuz compound is really cheap like each of these bins that I got or like a five gallon bin is like 20 bucks so there's no reason to be overly conservative with your joint compound so I'm also switching to a slightly smaller knife so again I'm just going to do this wall live not make it too long and just kind of go through the motions and see how it works so I'm I've seen a tip that was basically like you you can put more mud on by going sideways like this so that you're not kind of scraping everything off when you do it need to so that feels like a good amount Point here isn't to scrape off everything I just put on what I read was get a clean version of your trout and just depress it lightly and just kind of butter as if you're like buttering toast down the wall that looks I don't know that looks like pretty good coverage I see some areas that aren't great so I'm just I'm going to Mud up this entire wall real quick and then I'll come back when I'm done going to take tape tape needs to go all the way up to here going to unroll it a bit make sure I'm actually putting this properly on the joint actually going to tear it right there so that I can move this starting piece over a little bit again I know I'm not going to be perfect at this what I want to make sure I'm doing is just getting the tape nice and gooey behind and stuck to it and making sure that I'm smoothing out as any of the sort of ridges behind it like these bumps which again not a big deal now I'm not going to pull this off CU I think I did a really good job but if I were to pull this off I would want to make sure that my tape had joint compound pulling off all of it with it CU that would mean that there was significant coverage behind it all right I think that's good so now I'm just going to take more mud and I'm going to lightly go over it again I'm not like building up a huge significant amount here I'm actually going to you know for this I'm going to switch to the wider one with any of these joints that are the um the rounded Corners remember there's a depression in between these joints so you're really actually kind of taking compound and filling that empty space with it and that's what's going to bring it up all the walls up to like the same level remember this is just also round one we're going to have sanding another coat I heard there's something called a flood coat I'm excited to desktop research what that is more tonight all right I'm going to finish up this wall I'm going to repeat everything I did around to let's see one two three four and this was five there's only five joints overall in this God I love working in a tiny space then I'm going to do the corners I'll go through the corners just a couple other tips and tricks I read but it's basically the exact same thing this I'm sure it's just slightly more complicated I'm assuming those people who are somewhat familiar with drywall know this but drywall has a crease in it so you can fold it perfectly for Corners the other thing is this angle right at the tip is 90° so if you can get nice and in that corner you're going to get a good smoothing process versus if you're kind of here here it's going to elevate and not go as well at least is what I read I I've been keeping it in this corner it seems to be going well hi baby how you doing can I come in you can come in but Daddy's going to finish um this thing right now okay so you can't pick you up got round one of everything mudded all of the joints taped off all of the tops taped off going to let it dry for 24 hours and come back in sand really really happy with that came out I think between filming and learning and doing research kind of in between things to make sure I was doing it right that took like three and a half hours so tiny rooms not that hard to dry wall all right day two it's been 24 hours I'm going around looking at all the tape joints everything seems to be good no like delaminations or anything so just going to do some sanding I'm not going to bore you with it I read like you don't really have to sand between coats what you're really trying to do is just knock down any high points and you can do that either with a scraper so like right here I can just kind of scrape off that high point or right here or you can use a sanding block which I'll probably do a mixture of both I think mainly up here in these uh places then I'm going to move on to doing my second coat with the joint mix and we'll talk about that when I get to it all right that wasn't too bad we're going to move on to coat number two again million different things things I read about this some people with their hot mud talked about thinning it joint compound I read you don't need to thin it it's just on the second coat you want to use a wider broad knife I think is what they're called so I have I think a 10in one and a 12in one I'm just going to see which one is easier to use I am going to thin my joint compound just a little bit like nothing crazy I don't want it to be like liquidy but just something that I think is just a little bit easier to to work with the other thing is I'm going to just be strategic about this next coat so yesterday when I was trying to be very thorough I was overdoing it in terms of places that I just know are going to be covered up with trim or molding or any of that kind of stuff I'm just not even going to worry about those places this time because it's just a waste of mud and it's a waste of my time so the main focus is going to be these joints up here all of the corners all of the seams and then anywhere that I did patchwor like here and I think will go a lot quicker because I'm not doing any more taping I'm using a bigger TR and really this step is about filling the space a little bit more and creating larger smoother edges over the Run of things so that all the walls can be somewhat brought to being flat I read that like some people don't even do a third coat I'm very curious to see how this goes for this space and I'm just very curious like oh am I going to even have to do a third coat but let's start with the second one a little bit of water with the joint compound I'm going to mix it it in the TR cuz I obviously don't want to just add water to a full new bucket of the joint compound which by the way Sands really easily with just like 120 grit sanding block let's get to it All Right Drywall and mudding not that hard drywall and mudding well hard so I got second coat done on everything and to be honest I think it looks really good it might look really messy on camera but for a total new beginner falling directions I I think it's I think it's pretty dang good all of the tape joints they look really good everything is smooth and feathered these big kind of gaps that needed to be filled I'm just quite happy with how it all came together sanding this was super easy so I'm going to do another round of sanding tomorrow once this all cures and then decide like what the third coat really is and how to go about it and if it's like a really thin top coat if it's a flood coat which I read about so you'd see that El trim really disappears on that second coat so overall another good easy day with the drywalling going to be moving on to coat number three so as best as possible I'm going to be using this is a 10in broad knife this is 12 in so the key for doing this last top coat is really trying to thinly spread and really flatten out as much of the gaps as possible and I'll show you what I mean by that I'm also using another joint compound this one it's the same brand as the one before except this one is specifically for top coats it comes in a much bigger size this is the 3 and 1 12 gallon ones versus that's two quarts I think but this thing was like 12 bucks and so I don't have any use for it after this so I'll probably overuse it but I'm really just trying to finish smoothing out all of the joints and cover up all the places CU then I want to move on to painting after [Music] this so I don't want to spend too much time going into all the specifics on this last coat but the key thing that we're aiming for on this is a broad overall coat that creates the most seamless transition between all of the joints I'm not sure how well this is going to show on camera but this down here is a manufactured manufacturer's joint and if I put my piece underneath here it's probably not going to show super well but if I get really close you can see there's just like the smallest of gaps there meaning overall I need to just based on all of the joints fill that final Gap so that this is as smooth as possible and I'm sure if I went around let's see to this joint right here actually that one looks really really good overall I'm sorry if this isn't translating the camera very well here's another one let's see how that looks that's pretty good too so that is the current plan all right again now an expert here so everything I read was you know don't need to be conservative with this top coat so what I'm going to do is just pull from the bottom up do this nice overall that's already messy going to fill in that space as best as possible I'm pressing somewhat hard but overall I'm just filling in this middle Gap here this top coat is thinner than that joint one so already I can tell it's a little bit easier to spread out it's also a different color which is actually making this already easier just to see where I've spread this on so I've got middle spread then I'm just going to go one over just dropping o dropping compound pretty much everywhere one on the outside here flinging that everywhere I'm terrible at this it's good to see a beginner doing a terrible job right and then I'm GNA do one on the outside here again just pressure all the way down get as much of an even coat as possible down the middle so far I would not advise using this trout or not this trout this broad knife okay now that I've got this spread this isn't perfect but essentially what I'm going to do let me clean off my knife is essentially again I'm trying to spread wide in the middle here to fill this Gap so I'm going to try to feather The Edge feather this Edge I'm pushing harder this way but really I'm just kind of running it along the wall here not taking away the compound in the middle here similar to what I've done before but just Feathering a little bit more put all that compound back and then technically one smooth not trying to scrape it off just trying to you know flat in the middle as best I can that's actually really really good okay I just did all that live it's going to be really boring to see me do that in more detail but I'm essentially just going to do that whole thing again right right here and try to smooth all of this out I'll come back to you once I have it done all right I am done I don't ever want to dry wal mut again I think it looks pretty good going to say it one more time then we can paint I'm going to do my final round of sanding I've already started and what I've realized is that although the top coating version of the compound I used wasn't the easiest to work with it Sands really really easy so I'm not putting a lot of pressure just very light sanding and it's coming out very smooth the other thing that I'm going to do and it's going to be hard to sort of show this is it was very difficult to do really precise mudding up against those joints so I'm just going to take little razor blade and get up there and cut away those pieces and do a little bit of light sanding as well because eventually after I paint I'm going to go back and caulk all those so they will be pretty clean looking transitions overall but those are the last two steps I'm going to do before I can paint I've never had the pleasure of painting new construction where I like don't have to go all the way to the end of things I don't really have to tape anything off because it's the bare floor so I think the only tricky part is just going to be painting around the rafters as usual that's been the complicated part of all this but got my ultra white paint I'm very undecided as as to what the like overall ultimate aesthetic of this place will be like right now I like the wood ceilings I like white walls it's going to be light beachy Beach House Vibes in here sometime down the road I'll probably change that but for now just really excited to get some paint on [Applause] [Applause] two coats of paint all done think it looks awesome I'm really excited actually just to like trim out the windows and the doors I think that really is going to tie it together same with like the baseboards I have an idea to just complete the beams up here so I'll take you through that step overall I think it looks great next step is going to be cleaning up all of these joints so again these are peel away so we can get up there and we can peel off the hard edge of all these things I'm sure they're not going to look perfect I'm then going to use some Big Stretch white caulk and I'm just going to flush up every single joist to drywall piece and I think that will look really good but I'm waiting for the paint to dry but overall like pretty happy it's very clear that I am an amateur drywaller who missed a ton of of things but at this point I'm the only one who can see the mistakes all right so one detail that I struggled with a little bit it's like a detail that I hadn't figured out yet and then it came to me like as I was doing the finishing of the drywall and the painting was how to deal with it's kind of hard to see this joint up here where the drywall on the angles on the sides meet the ship lap ultimately what I realized is because it's basically like a piece of trim is I could take just a clean 2x4 and rip it in half and it becomes like a piece of trim that will match the joists up here that are exposed and I can just place it up against here Brad nail it in place and then caul the seam and it'll look like a really clean joint overall so I took a nice 2x4 that I could find I ripped it in half Alexa turn on the vacuum [Music] I planed it down on both sides and I sanded it and then I marked out this angle up here and translated it to angle on my miter saw and I went back and forth a couple of times just to get like a really tight fit on both sides and now I can just lift it up in place and secure it on on both sides looks pretty good once that piece is in place we can go around we can peel all of the lbad off and we can use some caulk to then finish the seams and I think it's going to look really good it's going to kind of like tie everything together I'll be very excited to be done with this whole process cuz it's definitely been one of the most tricky ones to figure out out um for this build I'm going to start pulling off these strips let's just see how clean these look I have a feeling there's going to be more touch-ups than just simple caulking but we'll see kind of hard to get off just got to break the end and then let's see that's about what I expected let me see if I can get really close so you can see it's definitely going to need some cleaning up but I think between cleaning it up some caulk and then touch-up paints it's going to come out good I'm going to peel the rest of these off I'm also just wondering like did I build up too much joint compound on them and there's some buildup there I don't know I don't know how I would have done it differently those strips peeled away pretty well I'm going to get up there I've got a sanding block and I've also got some 120 grit paper and I'm just going to clean up the rough edges for it on basically all of them so that then I have kind of the flattest Edge to create the C joint between and then I think after I do that I'll probably go back and do one more round of touchup with paint up there this is where it's just like a bunch of boring finishing details so I'm probably not going to show a lot of it I'll just show you the after also I hate this stool it is so freaking loud this combo works really well so I've got this whole side cleaned up in terms of Peel Stripped Away I sanded down sort of like the excess caul I think as best as possible I'm sorry the excess um joint compound that was kind of up against the ridge that's been created I truly don't know how this is going to go so I've got this product called Big Stretch which is just a type of caul that can spand it can I believe it can expand up to 500% its original size it's paintable it comes in 12 colors this one is white so here's what I'm going to do I'm just going to pick one of these and test doing the caulking in between that'll tell me if this is like easy to work with if I need to tape off something if I need to have like a brush or like something wet to kind of wipe off the excess cuz what I'll do is I'll caul it and then if that's good to go I'll do all of them and then I can come back and do one last round of touch-up painting for it so let's see how this goes that was a little bit trickier than I anticipated I think I learned a little bit I need to up the overall speed on that electric cauler to be honest the electric one might not be the right tool for this but I got this one done actually looks pretty good I figured out that using this little foam brush just to smooth out some of the excess and then having like a wet paper towel to do it I'm going to go around and finish it I don't even think taping anything off is going to really do anything cuz there's not really a great surface tape to stick to because of where the ship lap is and I think I can get it off with this and a wet cloth so I'm going to test out one more right [Applause] now that was a lot easier what I'm realizing is the guns hitting the next post and causing a little bit of trouble so I just got to go a little bit more vertically but that was a lot better all right finished all of the detailing and the painting so I'm going to call that step done so I just want to quickly touch on it and what I'm realizing and I brought it up before either in a previous video or earlier in this video is that ultimately putting those hurricane ties up made everything more complicated they should be there but putting them where I did has made it more complicated it made hanging the drywall more complicated cuz I had to cut around them it made mudding around them more complicated because I couldn't use that lbad everywhere and ideally what I should have done is with the gift of hide and sight I should have removed all of the hurricane ties that I had put up move them to the outside so that the interior of this place would be just the joints it's the only thing you see I could have been a lot more liberal about my cutouts for the drywall I could have used lbad everywhere it would have been a lot easier to mask and tape off I am not kidding when I say that I think I spent probably eight total hours Det tailing everything around these joints so that included more spackling more caulking smoothing all that out removing excess painting taping painting again clean up and sanding like I just made that process so much more difficult for myself however it's really important to me that that looks good and while I'm pretty much at this point never going to be able to do anything about the h huran ties that I can see although you actually can't see them from this angle and I think it looks really good it's just something I'm going to have to deal with and I do think it came out really really good I will take you up there just so you could see it is not perfect it's reflective of my skill set and it's reflective of a lot of hard work and planning put into it just not quite enough planning but we are wrapped on that I can go around I can install like fixtures although I think I'm going to need to order some oversized fixture plates because my cutouts aren't great I spent some time sweeping and vacuuming up and now we are ready to move on to installing laminate floorings which I'm really excited about I think like that's like a big final piece of this plate sort of to tie everything together all right so that is going to wrap it up for this episode if you have any questions about this project materials process some stumblings that I went through or you just want to generally understand where I got some of my information from so that you can combine it with this video and do your own research please feel free to leave a comment and like always I would be more than happy to respond and give you as much information as I can now if you are watching these in real time make sure that you are subscribed to the channel so that you can be around and be notified when the next video in this series comes out if you are watching these later on I will have a playlist linked to every video that is launched right here as well as the next episode in the series right here I'll see you guys next time on whatever it is that I'm building bye