It is a great feeling to have all-new walls in a room where before you only had crumbling plaster or moldy, saggy wallboard. All you need are a few simple drywall supplies: drywall panels, mud, tape, corner bead, and drywall screws. As an option, you may also want drywall shims and drywall nails. Drywall can get a bit more expensive if you purchase a specialty product like ultra-light drywall or sound-proof drywall. But even those pricier materials, at their hearts, are just gypsum sandwiched between two layers of paper. Drywall comes in convenient sheets that are 8 feet long and 4 feet wide. Often, they are doubled-up, two boards to a pack. Half-inch drywall is normally for walls, though it is used for ceilings as well. Slightly thicker drywall is used on garage walls that adjoin the house or in fire-prone areas, such as furnace rooms. While pre-mixed joint compound may seem like a luxury, don’t minimize the advantage of having the water pre-mixed into your joint compound. Correctly mixing mud can be difficult for do-it-yourselfers. If you’re mudding just a room or two, you will find it advantageous to buy pre-mixed mud; the cost savings is not enough to warrant mixing up the dry compound. If you want to reduce drywall dust, low-dust joint compound will significantly reduce—though not eliminate—those classic far-reaching clouds of drywall dust that will crawl even to the opposite end of the house. Low-dust drywall compound costs about twice as much as regular mud, but many users find the extra cost worthwhile. Paper Tape The best thing about it is that it is just paper—which means that it is cheap and easy to find. If you think that paper tape isn’t strong, think again. Try demolishing an old wall joined with paper tape embedded into the mud and you’ll find that the joints are just about as strong as the drywall itself. The paper tape serves to join all connections, except for outside corners. Use paper tape:
Butt-joining two sheets (two flat ends, no taper)Joining two sheets that each has a tapered endJoining drywall sheets on inside corners
Fiberglass Tape Alternatively, if you want to spend a bit more, flat fiberglass tape provides a super-strong joint and, the best thing of all, it self-adheres. Paper tape requires you to first lay down a thin coat of mud to get the tape to stick. But Fibatape already has an adhesive backing. The good thing about this—besides removing a step from the work process—is that the tape lays onto a perfectly flat board. With paper tape, there is the chance of embedding it into lumpy, less-than-smooth mud. The secret behind the corner bead is that the outermost edge of your outside corner is a material other than the drywall compound. Depending on which type of corner bead you choose, that outermost edge is either metal or plastic. When painted, the transition from the metal/plastic corner to the joint compound disappears. This is one thing that explains the popularity of drywall screws. Poorly affixed nails pop out; screws don’t. Make sure your screws are coarse thread, not fine thread, for surer grip in wood studs. Verify that these screws are phosphate-coated to resist corrosion. A good length is 1-5/8 inch-long drywall screws for either 1/2-inch or 5/8-inch thick drywall. Purchase just one pound, to begin with, to ensure that you and these particular screws get along together well. If you like them, then buy them in bulk. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck with a broken-up 25 lb. box of screws that the store will refuse to take back. Shims can be used in so many ways. They can bring the edge of one drywall sheet outward to match the edge of an adjoining sheet. They can be placed in the center of a sheet (in back) if a section of studs is concave. Or they can be used to raise areas around a bowed section of studs. Drywall shims are so inexpensive and valuable that they should always be in your workshop. If you’re driving drywall screws with an electric drill, it’s a time-consuming process to drive hundreds, if not thousands, of screws. Drywall nails take just a couple of seconds to drive. Drywall screws can be difficult to place, depth-wise. If they are too deep, they break the facing paper and must be placed elsewhere. If they are too high, they ruin the look of the wall. But placing drywall nails is simple since the hammer’s blunt face won’t tear the facing paper as easily.
