Is Wet Sanding The Answer To Drywall Dust?
Saturday, December 27th, 2008
Scraping Off The Bumps
When I first tried taping and finishing drywall, it was quite a dusty mess! See my description on My Drywall Story page. Drywall dust is just plain dreadful. In my early days of drywalling, some friends told me about “wet sanding”. This is where you use a wet sponge to smooth out the surface between coats instead of sanding and is a method mentioned on the 649 6th blog that chronicles his home remodel. And yes, wet sanding does cut down the dust to practically nothing.
But . . . for me, anyway, wet sanding tended to take off a lot of compound. And worse yet, and I speak for my own experience, I ended up making gentle waves in my wall with the wet sponge. So I ended up adding a lot of extra compound to flatten the waves out, and I ended up doing a bit of sanding at the end anyway.
The method I finally arrived at, and this took several years, was to not sand at all until all the coats were on the wall. Yes, that’s right, NO sanding! Here is what you do: You put on even coats with slightly thinned mud and make an effort to draw off the coats level with a wide knife. Then, after this dries, you scrape the surface level with a taping knife (see pic above), holding the knife with two hands if needed. The taping knife will not produce valleys, but will instead knock off troublesome high spots. And low spots or drag marks will be filled with the next coat, which will go on nicely on your nice level surface. Only at the very end do I sand, and then only lightly, producing only a relatively small amount of dust. To get lots and lots of details, see my Taping Joints page and videos.