How To FIRST COAT DRYWALL
After you tape or "bed" all of the joints it's time to first coat everything. No need to be afraid, just work slow and follow the steps outlined in today's video.
It was VERY hot in that room and as the video proceeds you will see evidence of that. LOL
The first coat is critical. We need to avoid big ridges or pockets along the edges so that sanding is easy. When sanding is easy the quality of the job is established.
Don't be afraid to give a go. If you have a room to coat: "JUST DO IT !!"
Transcript:
How to First Coat Drywall
"Okay, so I have a wall that I'm taking care of. I've already got it first coated. Again, I used mesh and Durabond to bed my flats and to first coat my screws. So, I'm going to show you how I proceed. The first thing I'm going to do is scrape down all my screws just to make sure that any little bubble from the Durabond is gone, okay, so I can coat them. That's what I'm going to do. There's a little bitty spot here I want to indent with my knife, okay, very good. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and spot those screws now. I'm going to do it my way. Mud on my knife, okay, now I can show you again. I still have not on my knife. Notice I never went back to my pan. I just had enough mud on my knife. Now, if you want to do it as a DIYer, a lot of times it's nice just to spot individual screws. Let me show you how I do that up close. See, that's what's on my knife, it's in the middle of the knife, and I just put a nice little coat there and I just wipe it off. See, same is true, middle of my knife, nice little coat, wipe it off, nice little coat, wipe it off, right on down the line. And I can get all of these coated. The key is not allowing ridges. So, that's how we spot those screws. Now I'm going to scrape the flats, okay? I'm going to use my six-inch knife, and I'm just going to make sure that there are no ridges on there or edges. I can scrape down tool marks and the butt joint. I'm going to scrape down the middle."
"Okay, so let me show you how I do that up close. You can see, now this is just the bed coat anyway. I'm going to put two more coats on here, so you can see I just want to get the ridges off. See, that's my flat, my butt joint, just getting the ridge in the middle off. And you can see some imperfections. I'm just going to clean that up a little bit so that the first coat doesn't have any issues. Again, this is the bed coat. Now I'm going to put the first coat on, and I'm going to use my eight-inch knife, and we're going to show you how I do the flat and how I do these butt joints."
"Okay, so I've prepped all of this. My screws are all spotted. Now I want to do this flat. Okay, so now I'm going to use an 8-inch knife. Some people like to use bigger knives, 10-inch knives, 12-inch knives. I've even seen 14-inch knives, but I like to use an eight-inch knife on my first coat. Again, this is the bed coat. Now I'm going to use the first coat, and I like to use my 10-inch knife on the finish coat. The bigger the knife, the harder it is to manage your mud."
"So, I'm going to go ahead and coat this out, and I'm going to show you how I do it. I put mud on, and you notice I have a little tick. I always clean off that little bottom side of my knife. It's just a habit that I've gotten into. And then I'm going to put a nice even pressure on my knife to bring that mud on, and what I really like to do is keep it as neat as possible. Okay, so I'm just going to come along. In a minute, I'm going to feather all of this."
"Okay, so I always like to feather it before I take my first run along. And of course, you know, like I've shown you, you want to feather it by keeping the other side of the knife off the drywall, just a little bit of pressure. And that's how I feather that, and then the same is true on the bottom. So, let me go ahead and feather the rest of this. And of course, the reason why you feather it nicely is you don't want big ridges or big pockets where you're going to have to do a lot of sanding."
"Now that I've feathered it, now I'm going to go ahead and run my knife over, and I put a nice steady pressure on it. Okay, so I don't take all the mud off, and I see a couple little ridges here that I'm just going to re-feather just a little bit. Okay, that's good, right? So let me finish this seam."
"Okay, that looks really good. So now I'm ready to do the butt joints, and I want to show you how I do that because with my eight-inch knife, I'm going to take it one on each side. So let me get a little closer so that you can see what I do, all right? Of course, this butt joint goes all the way to the ceiling. I'm only going to demonstrate what you can see on camera. So, what I do is I take half of it and I put this eight-inch coat there, and I'm going to do another one on this side. Now let me show you what I've got here."
"As you can see, I stayed away from the middle. I'll finish the top in a couple of minutes when I get a bench. Stay away from the middle. Okay, so that's how I'm going to do that. Now, I do the flats first because it's easier to work the butt joint into a finished flat seam than it is to do the seam over the butt joint. At least to me it is. Okay, so I always do the butt joints last. So here you go. So now I'm going to feather each side of my butt joint."
"Then I'm just going to work it and try to keep the edges off of it so there are no ridges. I can feather that. Okay, then I finish that seam off. Okay, so there you go. So let me give you another close-up. As you can see, each side is feathered, okay? And it worked really nice. I'm going to do a bottom butt joint now, so I'm going to repeat that same process except I'm coming up instead of down. So let me go ahead and spread my mud."
"Clean up a couple of little ridges and just neaten up that seam a little bit. So there you go. So one of the challenges in the butt joint is when you have a lightbox in it. So, what do we do? How do we coat around this? How do we finish this so that it's a good job? Well, I like to clean it out first, and you know the wires are well in. I'm not worried about touching them, so you do have to be careful. You do want to be careful with that."
"I like to clean all of that up and get all of that debris. Scrape any little edges that are off of it because we're going to kind of work over this box. Okay, so I think I'm good. There's a little bit of dust in there, but that's okay. We're actually going to get some mud in that box, but it's okay if you do because we can cut it out after it's dry. So, let me get some mud and let me see what we can do to coat this."
"Right, so let's have that. So, I'm going to do what I normally do on a butt joint. I'm going to coat both sides and scrape it down, make sure that box is nice and clean around it. So, I'm good, and I'm going to start on this side, and I'm just going to put my... and then I'm going to do this side, and I'm not going to do the middle. And I'm going to go right to that box, and on the way up, I'm going to do the same, and I'm going to put a little mud in there."
"Okay, so let me feather this, get both sides done, and I'll finish the easy side first. We're just going to coat that right on up to the seam, clean off any little edges. Okay, that looks pretty good. So now I'm going to coat this. Now we're going to float that right over that box, just like that. Okay, I'm going to feather this edge a little more. I'm going to float right over that box. That's why I cleaned it up so well so that I don't get anything over in my mud."
"Okay, so let's take a look. A little bit of a new ridge there, so I'm just going to try this one more time. Okay, there you go. Okay, so that's good for the first coat, and I'll give you a close-up to see how that looks. Okay, so there you got a little bit of mud in the box. We can clean that up, and that's how you do that. As you can see, there's no big ridges. It's nice and clean and ready for that next coat. So, there's the lightbox, a little bit of mud on it, and it'll be fine. It's going to coat out nice when I do the finish coat. Again, you're going to see all my ridges are gone. I feathered them away on my butt joint. I've got all of that. I've got the center basically ridge-free. Okay, my screws are all ridge-free, and they're going to get another coat. So basically, that's what it looks like. Very nice. So that should finish coat really nicely. And of course, the goal is to have minimal sanding. So thanks for watching. Let me tape this wall or coat this wall. We appreciate our viewers very, very much."