today I'm doing a video just for you guys this is gonna be a response video to answer all of the questions I've been getting on our channel about drywall and repairs and home maintenance and I have a simple message to tell you don't worry about it it's just drywall so in today's video I'm gonna show you all the tips and tricks that learn from my past years of working on the construction site now to fix messes like this messes like this gaps and cracks unevenness holes oil paint transition when you put your drywall in backwards
how to cover up stucco ceilings and different kinds of scenarios where you've got texture on the roof there is a lot of information out there that can be really simply applied to solve your problems but if you're intimidated with touching your drywall that you're gonna be too creative and do something risky for instance if you want to know if you have a leaking plumbing valve don't be afraid to open a huge hole in the back of the closet take a look it's so easy to replace and repair drywall we're gonna show you all the steps
today to take the fear out of been opening up your walls and solving your problems number one if you have a hole and you've got to repair it the easiest way to do it without damaging your house cutting your electrical circuits cutting a hole in your plumbing take your often knife okay you can get on Amazon just follow our link in the description you set it to just a little bit more than 1/2 inch okay and you want to cut the hole wider than the damage because impact damage always is bigger on the back side
of the drywall than the front it's kind of like a hollow-point bullet it doesn't look too bad up front but it's not designed to make a big mess on the front right here we go all right and you want to just run a couple of passes until you're all the way through piece of cake because once you've got a square hole it's easy to patch it now if you've seen some of our other videos you've probably seen this already but this is such a great technique it's worth revisiting this is called the California patch and
what I'm doing is I'm just eyeballing to cut a piece of drywall a couple inches wider in both directions so that'll cover my hole okay what I'm gonna do line it up take my knife just inside the cut and I'm gonna score the brown paper from the backside it's both sides and we're gonna do the same here and we're gonna try to give ourselves a little bit of room to work with cuz you only want to do this once it's okay if it's a little smaller than the hole break it and then hold them and
then peel it from the paper leaving the paper on the front this makes the perfect patch one of the most amazing benefits is at the white paper on the front of the drywall is thinner than the drywall tape that you would buyer to patch it with so it actually creates a lot less work when you go to finish you're gonna take your drywall compound and you can buy this in a variety of different ways if you're a homeowner you're just doing one repair you can get in a little tub if you're gonna buy just a
little bit I would recommend buying the powder by the 45 or the 90 mix up for yourself because then you'll always have it on hand you get real good value it's only ten bucks for a huge bag and the other stuff that you buy in the little tubs generally is really difficult to sand it's gonna drive you crazy now you take a little bit of mud and the idea here is to leave it on the inside of that framing that of the cut okay doesn't work too well in the top ever but here we go
here we go alright and then all the way around take it and we're gonna put a little bit on the inside edges of all the rope as well and we're just gonna press it in if you find it not going in all the way maybe there's a little bit of restriction just use your knife to level off the corners and then press the tape in you're just embedding the drywall tape and you want to do this just once okay if you work it too much it's gonna wrinkle because of the moisture and it'll cause you
all kinds of pain so get it in wipe off the extra mud and walk away after that's dry you can come back and do another coat and it should be done with a four by ten knife like this alright and I know it's not dry yet so bear with me okay and use outward pressure on the top pull it nice and tight and then come through the middle at the end all right if you let it dry between coats sometimes a second application with this knife is all you're gonna need so you don't have to
do it over and over and over again you don't have to sand it between coats just let it set up less is more pull it tight and flat and you'll be happy every single time the second situation I see a lot of people commenting about is they need to check their and do an inspection on their valve or they want to change the valve from the backside if you want to do an inspection anywhere in your house let's say there's sharkbite valves and maybe you think might be dripping or something like that you can buy
one of these spring-loaded trap door okay they work great and the idea is the hole that you have on the wall needs to be as big as this framework here plus some distance for this to tie in and put some compression on so what I generally try to do this isn't 8x8 but I'll try to cut the hole so that it's about that big nice and square so here we go not I'm not big enough here and you can use a drywall saw for this and you can cut the hole bigger than you need okay
[Music] it only cost six bucks and all we do to set this in is put pressure on the single tab first because it will slide and you push it over and you rest this in and it's snaps back in place now if this is down on the wall by the toilet or if this is in the ceiling of your basement or if this is in the closet on the back wall nobody cares you can put these in all day long you can even paint them the same color as the wall or the ceiling it's very
standard you can also use the same trapdoor in the ceiling in the basement for shutoff valves and pipes in different situations or clean outs for your sink island whatever have you so don't be intimidated if you need to have access to the area behind drywall cut a hole stick in a cover because it's that easy to take off and it looks just pretty good the next the next trick I'm going to show you is actually it answers a few different questions what do I do to fill big gaps what about if I'm going from a
new wall to an old wall and there's lots of damage or it's lath and plaster and there's lots of damage okay or if the old wall is a different thickness these situations are all taken care of if you own one of these guns having a foam gun gives you lots of control I'm going to just get this started here here we go turn the trigger really low and you can feel just about any gap or crack exactly the amount of foam that you're going to need now if it's really nasty you can overfill it it
doesn't matter because what this does this sets up in about 15 or 20 minutes okay and you might find that this is a great alternative to using 45-minute drywall compound all right if you already have this tool it's really handy it does a great job and it becomes the backing remember we're just adding mud and the surface this becomes the backing it also is an adhesive between the different material so you don't get cracks you don't need to apply any paper that's amazing so one of the questions I get is a lot of people their
first time renovators they've done all the installation they're down to their last piece of drywall it's not quite big enough to fit or you've got a big gap in the ceiling because you're in an old house like mine and the ceiling has a bit of a ball to it and you can't install everything square and level so again take about the foam open it up pretty healthy shoot it at the corner so it has something to hit and it'll expand in and out of that corner and don't worry about how much of a mess it
makes remember the goal here is that when that's done drying its expanded in behind got solid so you can trim off the face and have a backing to do your taping now we're gonna go up to the top of the ceiling where I did this yesterday and I'll show you how it looks so the secret here is we're trading backing right so open up your blade so I this tough to boat where do you think the depth is all right and we've been sawing action and then just gently trim it across there okay and then
you can clean it up nice and tight all right now I'm only gonna demonstrate just a little bit less I'll go right into the corners I actually do need this to be finished today okay I'm happy with that it's not looks pretty nasty but it's ready to be worked with so I'm just gonna tape out the joint here a little bit real quick now when you've got a scenario like this I've actually got about an inch gap from where the drywall finished till the ceiling and the ceiling doesn't make it all the way into the
corner it's a nasty mess and I made it a nasty mess on purpose to show you how easy it is to fix there we go run your mud off the side of this knife here no this foam does not react to the compound this isn't gonna melt it or affect it at all okay yeah got to keep the dirt out of your mud yeah I'm just gonna go what I call flat taping flat taping flat taping is the process of just going on one surface I'm not going around the corner and you can push that
up as nice tight as you want okay and then we'll press it in now that we've got that pressed in you don't have to wait till tomorrow to come back to fix it here's one other trick when you're taping with much you can do multiple layers of mud and paper it's okay you can sandwich it as long as you give it time to dry before you come back the next time to fiddle around with it okay try to keep your mud in the middle of your hock the whole time you're working all right now we're
gonna apply them under the ceiling catch your drips try to work as clean as possible okay there we go and then again off the side of the knife we're gonna snowplow it right in there okay just pretend that that paper and bud there it wasn't a tear of previously and I measure off a piece of tape gonna get a nice straight edge pre fold it there we go we have a nice flat surface up top so I'm gonna use that to trust my line gentle pressure all the way across okay painting the edge one more
pass that's good now hold the knife flat against the wall cuz if you are ain't too loosey-goosey with it you'll just push everything in and make a mess there we go IMAX zoom in there and tell me if that corner doesn't look perfect now if you want to save even more time and you're comfortable with using your knife you can go back over top and you can apply the inside corner of the forage application right over that paper tape alright and then the next time you come back all you'll need to do is a six
inch knife just to make sure that it's perfectly smooth and feathered oh all right done it's not that tricky anybody can do this the next issue you're gonna run into is I get questions like this all the time hey I got a rusty nail or a rusty staple or residue from tape or oops I was doing a weird angle and I installed the drywall backwards and I see the brown paper can i tape over that and the answer is yes of course but you have to prep it first you need to use a Primus so
here we go I've got tape let's get this out of here okay well the tapes gone but I still got that red stuff left got broke a poor showing I've got dark pencil I don't care even if it's marker there is one solution for all your problems and if you're taping your house you've got to have this can on you at all times pom pom yeah if you're a fan of the channel you've seen me use it before I put this on everything okay brown paper no problem oil-based primer red tape no problem oil-based primer
marker no problem oil-based primer with the pigment look at that this just disappearing I'm doing an infomercial here oil-based primer works on everything let's say you have an old house with laughs and plaster and oil paint kills you can buy it in a can and roll it on the wall they even have an odorless formula of an oil primer just for transitioning from oil to latex so that you don't have your paint peeling off over time if you're ever stuck and you were in trouble and you don't know how to solve a problem think oil-based
primer and then all of your new muds and compounds will bond to it if you use oil-based primer over plaster new drywall compound will bond to that so you don't have to go to the buy plaster and mix it up yourself saves a lot of time and money this is money in the bank and before anybody starts putting it in the comment section no kills did not sponsor this video I just love the stuff okay let's move on I don't need the tape here anymore now we're gonna get away from the traditional drywall compound we're
gonna get into the quick-set mud we're gonna show you everything that it can do here's another one of the most popular questions out there I can't find sheetrock for five anywhere what do I get this is a CGC company that means Canadian gypsum corporation trade from the United States you're gonna find a u.s. G which is United States gypsum okay they make a forty five mix as well this is not proprietary technology all right it's really basic stuff so 45 here is 45 there it's the same stuff just a different supplier we have border issues
right so okay I'll just get along all right then what we're gonna do with the powder of course and a lot of you might have seen this alright so we're gonna just do a quick short version of this we're gonna make a lot of volcano on the hawk and I don't know sometimes it's easier to move the hawk than the knife all right volcano time here we go the higher the walls the easier it is to control everything okay now I'm using hot water if you want your coat 45 minute mud to set super fast
so you can keep on working use hot water throw a little salt in it right this is a chemical reaction we're dealing with now so basic science grade eight heat plus salt changes all the chemical reactions and speeds things up so we're gonna go add my hot water Oh making a mess this is not the way the demonstrations supposed to work better close that up got a dam up the hole alright got it to do to do I'm gonna sprinkle it in of course and try not to have another dam break on us but it
happens here we go doesn't have to go over the top sometimes it start leaking from underneath if you want to you can go with a little bit less water until you know you've got it under control but I found with this hot water and you've really just got to be able to move and manage the mess and it's worth paying for here we go ready now we're gonna go for it we're gonna go making a mess that's okay construction site yeah that's okay we're not gonna worry about it because this reaction happens so fast that
if I don't move and get it done by the time I'm done fiddling around it'll ought to be red rock hard try to mix it somewhat smooth this is a race against time here we go and it's already turning into a hard pace now just for fun we're gonna come back after this brief brief word from our sponsors we don't have a sponsor or am I talking about I'm just saying it's not yet yeah I know it's gonna happen that quick give it about 60 seconds okay so now we're back we have only been a
couple minutes and to be honest it's not completely hard but it is setup okay it's stiff enough that I can work with and I'm just gonna cover this now with my regular compound and it won't end up blending together and peeling out of the hole and when this is dry it's not gonna shrink or expand or do anything crazy like that on you you can do all this at the same time all right I mean is this mud my goodness it's a little loosey-goosey what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put paper tape majority on
the old wall all right and I'm pressing it on the original hard surface and now I'm just gonna set it into the soft with a little bit of pressure and then I'll watch the mud just rising away from the tape and that's how I know that I've embedded it I don't have a ridge from the mud I haven't embedded it and it will bubble there we go you remember earlier we talked about that we can use expansion foam and it bridges the gap and it seals it together so you don't need the paper tape you
should use the tape anyway if you're using the 45 you have to use the tape all right again we're just gonna come down and set this up with a nice new layer mud and we're gonna embed it on the surface here now nice force here on the original drywall okay and what we're trying to do is eliminate the action of having too much blood stuck in behind the basement we don't want to raise the surface off too much now we're going to just press those two pieces of paper together that are floating over that mud
in the middle okay look at that it used to be a nasty mess is now really well embedded together and if you see any areas where the paper tape looks like it's coming apart just get your knife in there put a little mud follow it up make sure the surface is nice and wet so that it doesn't bubble so okay while you're working you can always use the pail as a table okay so we're getting close to the end of all of the questions I've still got one two I got three more things to show
you but before I do my floor is creaky I've got to screw that down oh yeah let me just address this one issue if you have dents remember drywall is just dust compressed between papers so if you have a dent if it's dented on the surface it's also dented on the backside it doesn't get compressed it gets moved and that's fine because dents can be adjusted simply like that you don't even think twice about them just fill them and go unless they're big enough that they've actually broken through the backside my rule is this if
it's not bigger than one and a half inches it's not concerned about all right you don't need tape you don't have to fuss with it just fill it and you'll be fine now getting back to this all right once this is filled you got to treat this like a butt joint you want to fill this side and then you want to fill this side okay and by Phil meaning pressure on the outside here and pressure on the outside here I think it'd take a little bit of mud and run it right down the middle with
a fair amount of pressure and here's a secret will be even it be don't touch it again let that's right completely what we've done now is we've set the depth of the wall to this point this Ridge simply means that I have to fill a little bit here and a little bit here to get this nice and smooth this Ridge actually becomes your guide line now tomorrow when it's dry I can come back and I can use my four inch knife just scrape off that Ridge all right and I'll start in the middle with a
thin coat and I'll be using pressure going the outside if you want to know how to actually finish a butt joint properly you can click the link to this video here we've done some information on this series previously and it'll go through all of you how to fill corners and do it all that sort of thing when to use the 45 minute mud versus the other it's a great video I think you're gonna like it and one other thing I'm not going to cover today is nail pops we've got a great video on nail pops
we call them nail pops if it's a nail or a screw so don't get offended if you have one or the other it's all the same business and it's all dealt with in the same manner if it's a nail hammered in a little bit if it's a screw you screw it in a little bit but follow all that information in the card up in the corner okay yeah let's get on to the next two things that are going to be life savers on your job site so the next thing that people get intimidated about dealing
with drywall is the mess and rightly so because drywall dust is actually lighter than air it seems right it goes everywhere there are two things you can do to manage your mess well actually three one you can clean as you go resist the temptation to sweep unless you but this this is what we call drywall sweeping compound all right and there are a couple of different companies that make this stuff one of them makes it green one of them makes it red I buy this stuff because it's available on my local Home Depot and the
truth is I've been shopping Home Depot forever because Raya grew up we didn't have options it was Home Depot or no Depot so I'm just really used to their store and products what you do is you just sprinkle it just like as if you're raking your grass right you throw it up against the wall and this step is formulated it instantly bonds with that light drywall compound okay and it will bond to it and then you can sweep so it doesn't go up in the air all right if I sweep compound regular you see all
the dust floating around did you see it if I sweep it with the red dust you're not kicking anything up in the air all right that whole bag will last the entire job so 15 20 bucks whatever it is to not be kicking that dust up brilliant invention the other thing you can do is you're gonna open your window and you can shove a fan in it okay the best defense you have against dust in your house - putting a fan in your window like this you can get these at home table for 40 bucks
and they blow a ton of air that's what I do without a doubt the most intimidating project in everybody's house is the stucco ceilings everybody's worried about and we get comments every day how do I deal with my stipple ceiling what if I have asbestos should I remove it should I take it down should I go over top should I skim coat it dear Lord no skim coating that ceiling will take you more time to energy and money than doing this take your piece of drywall get yourself a lift or a couple friends okay throw
some mud on it and the thicker the texture the more mud you're gonna want to have I'm just doing a quick demonstration so I think for purpose of demonstration I'm gonna cut this down to size you're gonna want to use these to install these are called drywall laminating screws and it's just like it sounds it's for sticking one sheet of drywall into another sheet of drywall when you have no idea where the framework is here's our worse you take your sheet with your compound okay you stick it under your ceiling yeah that easy and you
throw these in all right now these screws will not tighten up and be pretty okay what they will do is they'll hold that sheet in place until the drywall compound dries then the next day you come back you guess it um removed the screws tape your joints fill your little holes you can put in one of these screws every couple of feet it's not necessary to put a ton of them in just make sure you're holding it in place till it's dry and you can put a brand new ceiling over top of any textured ceiling
in just a couple of hours no mess no worry about asbestos mwah perfect every time and if you want to know how good that drywall mud holds trust me when I say it's not going anywhere it creates like a vacuum so here is my secret for what to do with my mud at the end of the day you've already mixed it in a pail clean down the sides okay and if you like you can even use a sponge the closer you get to the bottom the more you're going to want to have a sponge clean
all the mud off okay you know nothing's perfect in this world this mud has been exposed to the air the whole time you're working and drying it you're going to put your hock on top of it as a lid and it's going to dry out a little bit more so what you do just put a layer of water on there here's your lid there's your tools okay and you're good to go the next day now the next day when you get here you don't have crusty dry mud on the pail so when you're taking your
compound on you're not gonna have those hard chunks in the mud which will wreck your finish this is how you protect it so it's silky smooth all the time soapy smooth like Zohan now one of the questions we get all the time is should I buy the small tubs no I always buy it buy a big box or big pail it's not a lot of money and if you don't use it all it'll only last three or four weeks after you've opened it up and started using it okay it's not a big deal you can
make your own compound and put it in a pail and store it like this in the last three weeks bottom line is you want to make sure that your mud is in perfect condition for doing the job now listen guys we've got other great drywall videos that help you with a lot of your other questions we put a playlist together you can click the link over here and if you learn anything today make sure you hit the like button okay help support our channel by promoting our channel by hitting that button we'd appreciate it don't
forget to subscribe if you haven't and if you're interested in what's in behind that plastic wall over there then go into the video description click the link for reality Renta vision it's our other channel you're going to love it it's got all the project videos that we're putting up from this farmhouse renovation we'll see you next
