GhettoHardware.com - News

Patching wallboard seams

When a drywall seam becomes visible it is quite a lot of work to hide it correctly.

That said, it's totally doable in the usual 3x as much time as you expected.

Try spackling/sanding the gap. Give up after a few tries because it looks crappy. Learn the hard way that you are gonna have to do this one right.
Go to home depot. Buy heftier spackle (not the cheap crap you use to fill nail holes.), a wider putty knife, some of that flexible fiberglass tape for this very purpose, and get a belt sander used on ebay or soemthing.
use the narrow end of the sander (the part where the belt makes a abrupt 180 degree turn.) to rub down a groove that is a couple millimeters deep and the width of the tape.
Note: I don't think this is the correct usage of a belt sander... I don't really care though.
clean off the wall with a shop towel.
apply tape
apply one coat of plaster... don't try to fill in the whole gap. Let it dry ~1hr.
sand the excess off. Apply another coat. This one shoud be sufficient.
Sand it smooth by hand or with a less agreesive electric sander.
go to home depot again, and buy the textured wall in a can. Use that on your smoothly sanded fixed and filled seam. (I had to use the finest texture tube to match my wall. I still had to sand a little of the texture off to get it to match.)
Paint it. Be happy.
Vaccum the carpet a zillion times to clean the mess. (this one is a theory, i've only vaccumed once, so it's still a mess.)

Cost? Shit, I dunno... About 3$ spackle knife, 3$ spackle, 5$ fiberglass tape. ~10$ textured paint. (plus tools: 50$ in sanding equipment)

So yes, I thought it would take an hour or two and it ended up taking a few hours on multiple evenings, but it looks... Sooooo Goooood!

1 Comments

Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!

By Anonymous, at 1:31 AM