How To FIX Cracks in DRYWALL with MESH Tape

How I fixed a bad drywall job with Mesh tape and Quickset.

Transcript:

How to Fix Cracks in Drywall with Mesh Tape

Okay, so I'm at a job where a rehab contractor has gutted it. Some parts of this job still have the plaster on the walls, while their first attempt was to pre-fill some of the bad gaps in these walls. So, we have this joint now. They did their best and were trying hard; they did pre-fill some areas. However, as you can see in the close-up, it's really rough with cracks there. When we paint this job, we don't want all of that to happen again. We want to add stability to these joints and flatten the wall.

The first thing I'm going to do is spray and get all of the rough edges off, all the way down to where it meets the floor.

Now, one of the things they did was use white mud, specifically dust control plus three mud, for pre-filling. It's not what I would have used, but it's okay for that purpose. I'm going to show you what I'm going to use now.

I'm going to take mesh tape, and I know there are different opinions; this isn't the only way to fix it, and I'm not saying it's the only right way to fix it. It's just the way I prefer. Mesh tape and hot mud or durabond quick-setting mud will dry really hard on this joint. That's what I'm going to use. So, now that I've scraped it off, I'm going to clean the end and put some of this on the joint. It might not stick because it's self-adhesive; I might have to put some mud on. But it looks like it's going to work fine for me. I'm going to go all the way down and put multiple layers on because we have a compromised wall with many cracks.

I want to ensure my mesh tape is embedded nicely over that joint. Now, a little trick with the mesh tape: the end can get lost quickly when it goes back to the roll, so I always bend it over a little bit like that to easily find the end. This is just a little trick I use; others might do something different, which is also fine.

So, I'm spreading the mud using a six-inch knife because this is essentially a taping process. We're going to spread it and bed that mesh tape into the wall. It will bond and become very hard, giving us the desired joint. It might take a couple of passes to go over, but I'm mostly wiping off the excess mud since I'm mainly interested in stabilizing the joint and getting the mesh tape embedded.

Now, I'm going to do the bottom in the same way; there's not as much to cover there.

This video wasn't primarily meant to instruct you on how to spread or feather the mud, but rather to show you the technique I use on a problematic joint like this. I use top mud, specifically durabond 90, and I use two runs of mesh tape. By the time we come back and this has set, I can start smoothing it out, and you'll never even know it was a problematic joint. That's how I fix a joint like that.