All right now it's gonna get messy
You can see up above me here. There's some lines where the drywall is no longer meeting properly
We're not sure if this is from the house
Settling or if it's from the treadmill that we had up in this room for several years
There's bound to be somebody out there who's gonna say "You have a problem with your foundation
and your house is about to fall down and you better GET OUT NOW!"
I'm not an expert on house foundations
But I did do a little bit of research and from what I can gather most of the time when you have drywall cracks like
this, real small ones,
It's more likely to be the result of other stressors going on in the house or the house settling
Happens a lot around windows and door frames can happen when there's really strong
Storms that shake your house enough to actually crack the dry wall, or in our case, a big heavy
commercial grade treadmill that I ran on every single day in the room right above that
drywall. All of that being said we did have a professional come out and check our foundation to make sure all as well
For this particular project you're not going to use spackle you're gonna use joint compound
You're also gonna need some joint tape it's not sticky. It's just paper. You'll need a large putty knife
They sell fancier versions of this if you want
I will need a smaller putty knife because I've got some scraping to do before I get started.
And you'll also need a little bit of sandpaper. And I'm gonna use my
Palm sander because I happen to have one and it's really handy, and it goes a lot faster that way
Now this one I've never actually done before so wish me luck.
The first thing I need to do is measure these cracks so that I can cut the joint tape to the appropriate length
I couldn't seem to find my metal tape measure. It's probably in my husband's truck as usual, but this one works
Because of the way these things sort of meet I want to make sure that the tape will meet each other without overlapping
So I'm gonna tape them up to the wall just so that I can eyeball it properly
Right now it's gonna get good! Alright, so I'm gonna use my all-purpose joint compound
This is about probably four or five bucks at your home improvement store so it's cheap for this
the size of a jar. And I'm going to slather a bunch of this on there
And get a layer of about an eighth of an inch thick so it's kinda thick
Because you're gonna actually stick the tape to this and embed the tape in it
I was actually pretty scared to do this one
I don't know why I'd be more scared of this one than any others, but this one kind of freaks me out.
So I get lots on their way outside of where the crack actually is
Smooth it out with my bigger putty knife here, or caulking knife.
The smoother you can get it the less sanding you're gonna have to do later.
This tape, you want to stick on and
Really press it in and then take your your putty knives and kind of smooth it in there really press it in there good
Because it needs to be very well embedded
into
The joint compound. And if you need to use your other one to hold it, that's good
I think I didn't get quite enough up here so I'm gonna peel that back a little bit, yeah
Tricky part is I can't see the crack now
To make sure you're getting all those bubbles out make sure you go from varying directions so that you're
Really working them all out of there
Feather it way out from the tape
because that will give you a smoother edge later on.
I think I have this about as smooth as I'm gonna be able to get it for now. I'm gonna come back probably tomorrow and
After it's dry and add on another coat.
Okay, I'm gonna put one more coat of this stuff on here before bedtime
So that it has time to dry maybe I can finish tomorrow
You really want to feather this out WAY outside of the line.
It's sanding day!
Now after some thought I decided not to use my palm sander because I realized I wasn't gonna have sanding dust in
every crevice of this house
And it was gonna take forever to get it cleaned out.
My husband actually suggested wet sanding which sounded really strange to me because why would you wet sand drywall?
But I looked it up in a few places, and it looks like it's a viable option
so I'm gonna give it a try. What I've got here is a
Sanding block you can get it at Home Depot or Lowe's for pretty cheap
It's got sponge on the inside so it will hold a little bit of water, and I'm gonna try this out
I'm really surprised at how well the wet-sanding worked on the drywall
I know they use it for car restorations and such when they you don't want to make the finish nice and shiny
But it didn't occur to me to use it in drywall so I'm glad I tried it.
I'm just putting a little bit of primer on here.
What the primer does is it give it a nice, smooth, even surface for the new paint to adhere to.
And protects against stains and things like that.
That's definitely going to need a second coat, so I'm going to save this for later.
TA-DA!
It's been a couple of days, and it really looks fantastic
The paint color I am amazed that they got it as close as they did and I'm so grateful because I had no desire to
Paint this 2-story wall again. One thing though: I did not spend enough time
Sanding and that's really obvious in certain spots where I
definitely should have smoothed it out a lot better and
That might bug me a little and I may have to go back and actually sand that part down. So I wish I had spent
more time doing that. But otherwise, I think it looks fantastic. I'm excited to get on to the next project coming soon part 3