Taping & Mudding Drywall
The project is coming along extremely well and everything is looking good. Progress is being made and you can see the area turning out just the way you want it, but it’s not done yet. The final phase of hanging drywall is to apply tape and mud (joint compound) to all of the sheetrock where two sheets have now been manually joined together (the seams). Your local drywall contractor should be able to get this part of the process completed quickly but it is a step that requires attention to detail.
Why do we tape and mud drywall, what is the purpose of it? Well as a house settles (settling occurs for years after a house has been built) even the walls can shift by a couple degrees and if tape is not applied to the drywall before the mud is applied then cracks can begin to form where the sheetrock butts up to each other.
The tape does not offer any mechanical strength whatsoever, but it’s single purpose is to help make the seams invisible. By applying the fiberglass tape, it not only reduces the amount of drywall mud needed, but it also helps the seams from cracking and showing through the paint. Imagine having a beautifully painted wall start cracking before your eyes - awful!
At Naperville Drywall and Paint our crew has years of experience installing drywall so that you never experience any cracking. In fact, we all started in this trade from the very bottom learning the foundational skills and then working our way up to the more detail oriented skills. There is nothing we haven’t seen that we can’t handle.
When we mud and tape, we first apply a layer of tape to all the seams throughout the entire wall. The tape sticks almost instantly so we immediately apply the first coat of mud to the seams. The purpose is not to apply a hefty amount but we also don’t want to skimp out. They first layer is allowed to dry until it hardens and then sandpaper is used to remove any rough surfaces. The process is repeated another two times, each time the mud is spread out with a wider mudding knife so that it’s as smooth as possible with the drywall.
At the end, you should have a surface that feels like it was one giant sheet of drywall that was hung to the frame. Though this process is hard work and takes attention to detail, it is a very important step in the process. We’ve seen awful mudding and taping jobs from professionals where they didn’t care about the final result. The seams had rough surfaces around them and the screw heads were never covered.
Screw heads should always be covered to create a level finish and though you should never have a screw head popping out (we see that as well), the screw head should never fully penetrate the drywall either. Nonetheless, screw heads will never be perfectly flush with the newly installed sheetrock so mud is always necessary to cover them up.
If you’re looking for a reputable drywall company to do some mudding and taping for you, we’d love to hear from you! We take every job seriously and we do just as great of a job on smaller projects as we do the larger ones.
We proudly serve Naperville and the surrounding cities and we do work on both residential and commercial jobs. Give us a call today for an estimate!
Location
535 S. Washington Street #10
Naperville, IL 60540
Working Hours
Monday - Friday
7am - 8pm
Saturday
8am - 7pm
Sunday
9am - 4pm