digest
It's moving day, and somebody wrecked my corner. What if it's even worse than that? All right. Yeah, that is a broken corner. And anything can be fixed when it comes to drywall. The first thing we do when we have corner damage like this is take the back of the hammer and separate any drywall mud that isn't bonded really well. Get back to where it has good bond. There we go. So that's good bonded.
All right. Now, generally speaking, drywall corner beads have holes in the middle and holes on the outside. If you're not aware of this, the holes in the middle are to be filled with drywall compound and act as a bonding surface. The holes on the outside are designed to be screwed into the wood. So the first thing we're going to want to do is try to reattach the metal to create a new outside surface that we can mold. Because of the nature of the damage, we're going to use as many screws as we need. If that means one screw in every hole, so be it.
Most drywall corners have only two coats of mud on them. In new home construction, they'll do a fill coat and then a finish coat, and that's it. This is actually done really well. My son did this for me. He's learned. So the idea here is we want to have our knife coming up across. Put the pressure on this side and make sure we don't have any metal sticking out past flat. We're good here. We're good here. What I'm looking for is that I don't need anything bent sticking out as a protrusion. In this case, I can pass both sides without making contact. There's no chance I'm going to be able to reform that metal corner bead into something I can use. But I can use my hot mud to repair this corner and make it look brand new.
So we take our hot mud and we're basically going to fill this in with some pressure. Using pressure means we fill the gaps, fill the cracks, press this mud into those little tiny holes, and get better bonds. You're going to find that if you come out at an angle like this, a snow plow, it'll pull extra mud in this direction away from the corner. We'll do that a couple of times. On the first coat, we're not trying for perfect. We're trying for fill. There we go. Now I have more mud there than I need. This is excessive ridge, but we're going to let it set up and dry just like this. There's no sense trying to make something perfect when it's in repair mode.
Remember, when it comes to taping and drywall, you have your tape coat, your fill coat, and your finish coat. For the other holes, we had to do a tape coat. This one we go straight to the fill coat. Now that we've screwed it back, we're already on our second application, which is the fill coat, using hot mud, and we've reshaped the corner. Before this sets up in about an hour, we'll come back with our knife and shape that corner perfectly so it's ready for this final finish coat. All right. Not that tricky. We'll just shave and shape this.
In this particular case, I'm going to go with one more coat. It's easier to get a nice clean edge with the second coat. There we are. Like with all things drywall, less is more. There we go. When that one's dry, we'll come back with our sanding sponge, soften up that edge a little, make sure everything is nice and flat, and then put on one more coat of all-purpose compound instead of hot mud. That'll be a three-coat finish. We're going to sand this until we are absolutely in love. I love that so much. I think I'm going to leave it. But I'm going to do one thing for you guys: I'm going to put just a little more mud on here so we can see. Pull it nice and tight. Yep. Hardly anything. If you can't leave any mud on the wall, it means it's perfectly flat. Just so you know. Wow. All right.