Kitchen Makeover: Update #3 - Oh, the Spackle!

I need to do a few more things on the kitchen before I reveal the finished room. I thought I would post completely about spackle, though. Yes, you heard me right, SPACKLE!!

That is pretty much all my life was consumed with for many, many weeks. I was up to my eyeballs in the spackling of it all. I had to even take week-long breaks from the spackle so as not to go crazy.

Now, I will allow you all to follow along with the road to spackling madness. (Please note, I am no drywall expert. I am a complete amateur. Amateurs should not spackle. It really is not a fun job and it is much harder than it looks!) I did, however, get a lot of useful information here.

First, you have to round up the troops. Here is what I used:

- Sheetrock All Purpose Joint Compound
- FibaTape (mesh self stick drywall tape)
- Sheetrock Paper Drywall Joint Tape
- 10" Drywall knife
- Various Putty/drywall knives (not all shown)
- Inside corner tool (which I found to be useless)
- Drywall sanding sponge
- Other sanding tools

The first step to doing a joint seam taping project on manufactured home vinyl wallpaper walls is to wash down your walls. My house is no less than 10 years old, so there is a lot of gunk on the walls, especially since this is the kitchen. 

Also, just FYI. We had tried to just cover the seams originally with just spackle, and no tape. This was not a good idea. So in some of the pictures you can see the old spackle.

For the straight seams, you can use the self-adhesive mesh joint tape. The only tricky part about the mesh is that if you don't cover it with joint compound well, you will see the mesh outline under your paint. We have a few spots in our house where the old homeowners did repairs and you can see the criss-cross pattern.

Mesh tape added over previous spackle attempt. Before starting I sanded most of it off.

Add a nice big helping of joint compound over the mesh tape.

Smooth it down with your large drywall knife.

Allow to dry. Once dry, sand with a drywall sponge or other sander. As a personal note, this drywall sanding sponge works well, but did not hold up for very long. It is nice because there is much less spackle dust being flung about, but  the "sanding" part of the sponge came off after only a few uses. I ended up switching to regular sanding blocks.

Here is what the wall looks like after one coat of spackle:

You can see streaks because you use that sanding sponge wet.

Here it is after a second coat of spackle, dry and sanded. Looking better already, right?

I apologize that I don't have the next picture, but yes, you have to add yet another coat of spackle. You heard me right - 3 freaking coats of spackle. (And actually, we had some super crappy seams that needed almost 5 coats to make them look right.) Ugh! I think at this point I was so sick of the whole project there were no pictures being taken of anything.

But here is the finished seam that is primed and painted:

Isn't it pretty? I think it turned out really nice. You would never know there used to be a seam there. But, I suppose that is the point of all that spackling, right?

Some tips I learned from experience with this whole project:

- Do not use self-adhesive mesh joint tape in the corners. It does not work. At. All. The paper tape is not all that hard to work with. You lay down a coat of joint compound. Lightly wet the paper tape. Smoosh is onto your seam. Cover the tape with more compound. Smooth it out with your drywall knife. 

- Really do the three coats of spackle. You will thank me for it when you are done. (Although feel free to curse this recommendation profusely while working on your project).

- Drywall joint taping should be done before the rest of your house is finished, molding installed, etc. But, you can make it work if you have to after the fact. There is hope for you, if like me, you have had to look at hideously ugly vinyl wallpaper for five years or more.

- The corner tool does not work if you have walls that are not level. I don't think we have one plumb/level/square wall in our entire kitchen.

Kitchen Makeover: Update #2 (Cabinets done!)

Are you STILL working on that kitchen, you ask? Why, yes, yes we are. Needless to say, the spackling was a much more horrible time-consuming project than I would have expected. We are moving along, though. The spackling is finally done. 

We got the random cabinet that was added by the old homeowners stained and sealed to match the rest of the cabinets. 

This is before:

This is after:

I cleaned and scrubbed the spackling dust, grease, grime and God only knows what else off the cabinets. I used Murphy's Oil Soap and Pledge Revitalizing Oil.

They almost look like new!

I replaced the hideously ugly, non-matching brass and copper hardware (and yes, I said brass AND copper - because, as all of you know, these two go so well together) with oil-rubbed bronze matching hardware.

Seriously, who would think the above two sets of hardware in any way, shape, or form match?

Ahh, isn't that better? It is amazing to me how a little hardware can totally change the look of the room.

All that is left of our original project: priming and painting!! That will be this weekend's project.

Sometime later this month we will be replacing our ugly laminate countertops with tile. This was an add-on project that was inspired by the rest of the makeover. You can't have ugly countertops with a nicely painted kitchen, now can you?