The first year we lived here, I fixed the cracks and painted the walls in my kid's bedrooms.
My daughter's room went from this:
I fixed and painted up one downstairs room (it should be the living room) and it became my store. We moved our bathroom from under the stairs (yes, you heard that correctly) to an empty room without purpose. It's nearly done - YAY!
Now I can fix upstairs again. I began working on the hallway and filled in the cracks with drywall mud (it's actually called Drywall Compound). Then it had to dry overnight. Once the mud turns from grey to white you know it's dry. Then I used some 100 grit sandpaper wrapped around a block of wood to sand it smooth. There were some really huge places where the plaster had fallen off the wall and I had to re-mud those areas.
I use an old bed sheet to catch most of the drywall dust that I sand off the wall because apparently it will harm a vacuum cleaner to suck up drywall dust. I think my dad told me once that the dust is so fine that it goes right through the filter into the motor, but I might be wrong - it was a long time ago.
I painted some primer over the area I had worked on, just to see if I had missed any cracks or dents in the wall because it is really hard to see the parts that have been worked on after a while with patchy white plaster showing through the pale peach walls layered with white drywall mud. Now it is all patchy-white, but I could see the holes again. I re-mudded those bits and will sand the mud smooth today.
Here's a hint for anyone working with drywall mud: sand the wall as soon as the mud has turned white and is dry. If you wait a long time, your sanding time will be longer because the mud will be harder. I like to work as efficiently and easily as possible so I mud on the first day, and sand on the second day (except if the mud is still grey then I go around the grey areas).
The walls started out like the photo below. Then I scrape out the cracked area so that the mud has someplace to adhere to the wall. I then spread the mud onto the wall using a 3" wide metal scraper. Once the mud has dried, I sand the wall. If necessary, I will repeat the last 2 steps until the wall is smooth. Then the wall has to be primed before being painted (or wallpapered). |