Another Post About Mud!

Haha!  I bet you are just dying to read another blog entry about mudding - am I right?!?  Well, I'm so excited to be writing one - so read on friends!  Today we put on the true second mud coat - it is the coat that my dad said is his least favorite.  Luckily he didn't tell me that until we were about 3/4 through with the job or it would have been worse than it already was.  It was not my favorite either.  My arms sure did get a workout though.  My neck and my back feel so sore from all of the awkward contortions! 

We were just going over our tapered and butt seams again - but this time with a pretty thick coat. The technique is to apply a generous amount to either side of the taped lines, exceeding a few inches beyond the tape line on either side.  The mud is thick and when you apply a thick coat it takes some arm strength to have your arms up over your head applying these coats!  Then we took a 14 inch trowel and skimmed off the excess on both sides of the tape lines, being careful to take just the right amount off and leaving behind long, smooth lines.  My dad is a perfectionist (and I wondered where I got those tendencies from) to a point.  With mud he says you really can't mess around with it too much.  It is how people end up with a bad mud job.  So we did the best we could, which ended up looking really good!  It took about 2 hours to do the entire room.

Tomorrow my job is to mud any screw holes and lines that need filling, as well as to scrape off any pieces of dried mud that are hanging down.  Dad said he would stop by after he is done at work and check on how I did.  I am excited for the priming stage because it will really start to look good then. 

After we finished the living room mud job, we put a second skim coat on the small hallway that I scraped the texture off of.  I forgot to mention yesterday that my dad put a great first skim coat on that hallway.  He did it instead of letting me do it for two reasons: 1 - he was trying to see if it looked like it would cover the texture or if we would need to hang 1/4 inch drywall over the existing piece, and 2 - because he said it took a great deal of arm strength to get that first coat on - what are you saying about my arm strength, dad???  It turns out that the skim coat covered the texture perfectly!

I was grateful that he did it yesterday because I was dog tired when it was time to do the hallway.  I was dog tired today too but he had me do it...which is good because doing it myself built up some confidence and I learned a lot!  Similar to the living room ceiling, I applied pretty thick coats and then skimmed off the excess with the 14 inch trowel.  However, I did the entire ceiling which was unlike what I did in the living room.  I think we will have one more coat for the hall and then it will be gentle scraping, filling indentions, and sanding time.  I am going to put crown molding up in the hall to make it look a little nicer.