A Simplified Guide to Taping Drywall

A color-coded guide to flat, smooth, perfect walls.

By Travis Larson

From The Family Handyman

Images from this article

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Guide to Taping Drywall

To make your next taping job more successful, we’ve come up with a novice-friendly guide for getting good results. We’ve simplified professional techniques so you can learn them easily and recommended the basic tools and materials you’ll need to achieve smooth, flat walls ready for paint.

Since 90 percent of the cost of a professional job is labor, taping your walls yourself can save you several hundred dollars, even on small jobs. The key is a methodical, step-by-step approach with the proper tools and materials. Otherwise, taping will drive you nuts.

We’ll show you how to avoid the most common rookie mistake: heaping on mud and then counting on a massive (and filthy) sanding effort at the end to rectify mistakes. We’ll also show you how to gradually build up layers, feather edges to avoid ridges and knock off high areas of freshly applied mud.

We’ve added a color to each coat of mud to make it easier to see the proper order of application. The first coat is orange, the second green and the third yellow.

Although this three-coat taping system is standard, you may find that problem areas require more coats. Even the pros go back over difficult areas a fourth or even fifth time. Carefully examine the walls after each coat to determine areas that need more attention.

Buy or Rent These Taping Tools
You’ll find a mind-boggling assortment of gimmicky taping tools at home centers. The truth is, most aren’t worth having and you can do an excellent job with just the ones we recommend. Banjos (Photos 5 and 6) and clinchers (Photo 3) can speed up and improve the job. They’re a must for larger rooms with lots of corners. But for small jobs, skip the banjo, and if you only have a few corner beads to do, nail them on by hand and skip the clincher too.

1. Four-inch flexible putty knife ($5; Photo 7) for small filling jobs and applying second- and third-coat mud to angles (inside corners).

2. Six-inch flexible putty knife ($5; Photo 2) for larger filling jobs, embedding tape and filling fastener holes.

3. “Potato masher” mixer ($8; Photo 5) for hand-mixing a bucket of mud quickly and thoroughly.

4. Mud pan ($4; Photo 2) for convenient dispensing of patching, fastener hole and corner mud.

5. A clincher ($45 to buy or $7 per day to rent; Photo 3) makes quick work of crimping corner beads accurately in place to hold them for nailing.

6. A 12-in. trowel is less fatiguing and easier to use for applying mud to the joints and corner beads than the standard wide taping knives.

7. A banjo ($65 to buy or $8 per day to rent) is essential for all but the smallest taping jobs for dispensing mud-saturated tape right onto the drywall joints.

Selecting and Mixing Mud

Mud comes in “setting-type” and “drying-type” varieties.

Buy setting compounds only for filling gaps and repairing broken drywall corners (Photo 2). Setting compounds contain plaster of Paris to make them chemically harden. They’re usually available with different setting times. That lets you put on several coats in the same day, an advantage pros like. Once mixed with water, setting compounds can harden fast and if applied too thick are difficult to sand. Mix small batches so you’ll have plenty of time to work before the compound sets.

Buy drying compounds for actual taping. They come in powder or premixed in 5-gallon pails. We prefer premixed because it’s easier to mix and store. Despite its name, premixed compound is not ready for taping when you open the pail. You’ll need to add a little water and thoroughly mix the compound to the desired consistency before using it for the first time and before you begin taping each day.

Drying-type compounds come in three forms: taping, topping and our choice, all-purpose. All-purpose is designed to be used for all three coats in the typical three-coat taping system.

A 12 x 12-ft. addition will require about two 5-gallon pails of mud. You won’t need more than a few gallons of mud for the first coat, and since it’s mixed runnier than succeeding coats, transfer some mud to a clean 5-gallon pail before mixing and thinning it. Don’t let our colors throw you off; the mud for the second and third coats is exactly the same.

To keep the mud from drying out as you work, loosely cover the pails. At the end of the day, wipe down the insides of the pails and the bottom of the lid with a sponge to remove any deposits. Otherwise, dried chunks of mud will fall into the mix and you’ll discover the little troublemakers when you’re spreading mud. Then lock the lids on tightly. Every new day of taping, remix the mud before using, adding water as needed.

Buy the Old-Fashioned, Time-Tested Materials—They’re What Pros Use
Just as with tools, there are many new drywall products on the market purporting to make taping easier. But talk to a pro and you’ll find that few of them work any better or are any more durable than the old-fashioned taping supplies like paper tape and 1-1/4 in. solid metal corner beads.

Pick up enough corner beads to cover every corner with a single bead—no splicing!—plus one or two extras to replace mistakes. You’ll also need a small box of 1-5/8 in. drywall nails for fastening the corner beads. One roll of paper tape is usually plenty for the average-sized room, but they’re only a couple of bucks, so get two in case you come up short.

Spend the Time on the Prep Work; It’ll Pay Off in the End
No matter how accomplished you are as a taper, bad or incomplete prep work will make taping tougher than it has to be. It’ll also spoil a good taping job. Poorly installed corner beads will crack or work their way through the paint. Tape will peel, lift and blister if cracks or voids in the drywall are unfilled and simply taped over. Improperly set screws and nails or inadequately fastened drywall will cause nail pops for years to come.

Photos 1 – 4 show the basic steps so the taping will hold up over the long haul.

First Coat: Embedding the Tape
The “first coat” consists of applying the mud-saturated tape to all of the joints and corner beads and filling screw or nail holes for the first time. Begin with the butt joints first, then the horizontal tapered joints, then the angles and finally, the corner beads.

The easy way to apply the tape is to use the banjo, which not only dispenses the tape but also evenly saturates it with mud while you pull it off the spool. If you’re just working on a small area like a closet, skip the banjo and stick the tape on by hand into a layer of mud, then spread another coat over the top and embed the tape with a knife.

You’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll learn to play the banjo. The key is to mix the first coat of mud to the consistency of honey (it should be pourable) and spoon it into the hopper underneath a loop of tape. The right mix will result in even, complete mud coverage on both sides of the tape as you pull the tape out of the banjo and feed it onto the wall (Photo 6). Don’t be afraid to get your fingers dirty. As you feed out the tape, press and smooth it onto the centers of drywall joints with your fingers, then use the lip of the banjo to cut the tape to length. While you have the banjo in your hands, stick tape onto several joints at once, and then press the tape flat onto the joints with a 6-in. knife and tool off any excess mud.

After all the joints are covered, apply and flatten the tape over corner-bead edges (opening photo). Although some pros skip this step, a layer of tape is easy, cheap insurance against cracked corner-bead edges later.

Second Coat: Covering the Tape, Building Up the Joints
Some pros use special wide taping knives for applying second- and third-coat mud, while others use conventional cement trowels like we did. If you’ve used knives successfully, great! But if you’re a first timer, you’ll probably find a trowel easier to master and less fatiguing. Both take patience and time to get the right touch. When you’re first spreading the mud onto the wall to distribute it, hold the trowel at an angle away from the wall and slowly lower the leading edge as you empty the trowel (Photo 11). After the mud is on the wall, go back and hold the trowel flatter to smooth it out.

The second coat is the toughest coat to apply, especially on the butt joints. Don’t be shy about spreading this coat over a wide area. It really takes six passes with the trowel to handle a butt joint: three trowel-wide passes to apply the mud and three more to flatten the middle, smooth out the mud and feather the sides. When you’re through, the center should barely cover the tape, while the two sides feather out the center mound.

Different joints require different strategies, as we show in the series of photos. Butt joints, which join untapered ends, are by far the toughest because you have to build a wide, gradual “plateau” of mud and feather the edges to make the joint appear flat. In contrast, tapered joints along the long sides of drywall have recessed manufactured edges that are much easier to fill and level. They’re handled the same as butt joints, but the second coat doesn’t have to be nearly as wide or as built up because of the recess of the tapered edges.

Filling corner beads is about the simplest of taping tasks because you have the hard, defined surface of the corner bead to guide application (Photo 12). Just make sure to feather the edges flat to the drywall. Angles only get one additional thin coat of mud—on one side during the second coat (Photo 14) and on the other during the third-coat layer (Photo 17)—with each side done alternately so one side is always dry when you coat the other side. That way you have a hard surface to drag your knife against. Again, feather all outside mud edges flat, then refill all the fastener holes.

Third Coat: Fill and Smooth Low Spots and Other Imperfections
Before getting started on the third coat, scrape down or sand any projecting ridges over seams and excess mud on the corner-bead edges. If you did a competent job of applying the second coat, the third coat will entail filling in imperfections such as low spots, craters and tool marks. Use a “raking” light to highlight areas that need special attention. Hold the light against the wall so it shines across the surface to make all the problem spots apparent before you start. The second coat shrinks as it dries, so fastener holes and corner beads need to be filled with a third coat of mud.

Time to Sand—Yuck!
Sanding is the last step in achieving smooth walls. It’s also the least pleasant. Buy yourself a pole sander for the large areas, a hand sander for detail work and 120-grit paper and a medium 3M sanding sponge for cleaning up the angles. The $25 total investment will be money well spent.

Use the raking-light technique to constantly check progress and highlight irregularities that need more work. Be very careful not to oversand, especially in angles and on butt joints where mud layers barely cover the tape. Quit sanding the center of butt joints as soon as inconsistencies disappear. Angles only need light sanding. Try not to sand onto unmudded paper drywall surfaces too much or abraded paper will show through the paint. If you expose tape while sanding, you’ll need to add more mud and let it dry before sanding again. Exposed tape will show through multiple layers of paint.

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