I hate drywall. If I had the money to pay someone to come repair my cracked wall/ceiling joint, I would do it. I not only hate drywall jobs, but I’m also bad at it. And, more importantly, I don’t seem to be getting any better at it. I’ve been doing random drywall jobs off and on since I helped my dad redo a bathroom in 2005, including completely redoing my own bathroom in 2013. I don’t believe that in all that time and effort, I have gotten any better at it.
Currently, I’m working on repairing settlement cracks in the ceiling/wall joint of our great room prior to painting and I vowed that I would take as much time and as many layers of mud as it took to make it look right. Fortunately, my end goal was aided by the fact that we have orange peel textured walls and ceilings that cover up minor inabilities in the mud job. It still took me 5 or 6 applications over the course of 2 weeks to get it to an acceptable state. Useful Hint: Instead of sanding between applications of mud, instead use a wet rag to smooth the previous application. This reduces the dust significantly as well as leaves the painted wall beneath in its (relatively) original condition. IE: if you have a textured wall, the wet rag will leave that texture in place; whereas, sanding it destroys any existing texture. The wet rag process saved me at least 1 if not 2 applications of mud, it also allowed me to smooth through a curved outside corner that a sanding sponge would have destroyed.
The orange peel texture was a lot easier than I originally thought. Due to the fact that it was such a small area, we were able to buy one of the can’s to do it, and not having painted it yet, I’d say it looks pretty darn good. (I’m sure I’ll post again if it turns out terrible once we paint it)
There are no pictures due to the fact that our great room lacks sufficient light to begin with, and since were in the middle of prepping for painting, two of the too few lights have already been removed…. So the pictures I took sucked, and didn’t let you see anything at all other than a white blob on a red wall.
So all in all, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, but I still don’t feel like I’ve gotten any better at mudding drywall joints, I just had the luxury of time and patience to do as many coats as was necessary to make it look right. (I did not have either of those things when I was redoing the bathroom in our old house)
Happy Reading,
Sean