Taping and mudding, Round 1

Thursday night, Sarah and I set out to tape and do the first round of mudding.

Using the mix-it-yourself mud wasn't nearly as bad as I thought.  The bag only gives directions/amounts for the entire bag.  We mixed half an 18 pound bag (weighed with a bathroom scale!).  A full bag calls for 10-12 pints of water, so I mixed in about 5 pints, let it soak in for a minute, mixed with my drill for about a minute and a half or two, and the consistency seemed fine to me.  We were good to go.

First, I went around and filled gaps or missing areas of drywall around the windows, particularly from the removal of drywall around the old window.  You'll remember for a long time, I wasn't sure how to finish around the old window, let alone the new one.  After filling in the holes, I stapled vinyl corner bead around the windows, and mudded around them.

Like most of the kitchen, this is a new experience.  Hope this turns out alright.

Not bad for the first coat (in my opinion).

Sarah went around mudding over screws, and filling in any gaps between panels.  Then she went around and taped the seams.  We used yellow self-adhesive fiberglass mesh tape because my dad recommended it.  Seems to work great, mud gets into the mesh, and because it's yellow, you can easily see if you have enough mud on it or not.

I mudded the ceiling gaps and screws.  I then used 2 pieces of inside corner bead (metal backed paper) before finally running out of mud.  I expected to have mud leftover, go figure.  Still need to tape some seams and mud over them,  along with the other 3 pieces of inside corner bead.  That will be for another day.  Saturday, actually.