Pulp Bath Reno 2

Pulp Bath Reno 2

There are certain phases of projects that seem to drag and not progress as fast as others do, case in point, applying sheetrock compound to recently installed sheetrock, aka, mudding! Guess what was happening this week on the Pulp Bath Reno 2? Yup, it was “mud” time.

As mentioned last week, a recent minor surgery has slightly limited the use of my left arm (no prolonged movement overhead and no lifting of anything more than 5 pounds) which you might think would be a detriment to remodel projects, however, you can actually get a lot of the mudding process done with the one good arm. In a nutshell, you are basically applying the compound with a spreader (otherwise known as a spackle knife or paint scraper) to all of your seams, letting it dry and then sanding it as flat as possible. Then repeat…..and repeat…..and repeat! You pretty much keep going until you feel confident enough that your seams will be, well, seamless, once paint is applied. And I’m sure you are thinking, why don’t you just make the seams really tight and then you just have to throw on a quick coat of the mud, sand and you are done, right? In theory, that is correct. In real life and old homes, not so much. When all is not perfectly square and level, seams follow suit and leave you with tight ones in some areas, gaps in others and spots where two pieces of sheetrock just do not lay flush next to each other. Hello mud and hello time!

With the one good arm (and I am now able to start using the temporarily out of action arm a bit more this coming week) and taking some added precautions when going up and down ladders, the mudding process went fairly smoothly and we are near complete, as in, ready for paint. Working in the “out of action”arm on a little bit of the sanding was actually quite therapeutic and seemed to help on the recovery process, so all good on that end. Again, the “rinse/repeat” mud thing is time consuming but worth it when all said and done (and in this case, timed out just right). I should also mention that the arch we put in (see adjacent pic) was probably our finest arch install to date, so also good!

Up next? We’ll complete mudding the walls today and then apply a couple coats of paint primer. For this project, we’ll be setting the cabinets/vanity prior to install of the floor tile (thus the paint primer) which gets us to final plumbing on the vanity, which is actually two cabinets, each with it’s own sink, joined together as one, and then it is go time on the floor tile!

Some progress pics adjacent and below. See you next week!