I am in the middle of doing a drywall project, and am seeking advice on if I should float these gaps I've caused. Or, if I should just tear the wall down and start over.

After removing the living room wall to completely redo a few electrical and speaker wires, new drywall was put up and the wall was reaped and floated to perfection ready for paint. The wall looked great.

Here comes the problem... Because my back was bothering me, I hired a guy to install some wooden cleats for mounting some floating shelves. Like a true idiot, I told the guy to cut some small 4" wide strips about 5 ft long into the drywall. OOPS! I realized I shouldn't have done that, and then tried to repair this myself. The problem is that the 5 ft long empty spaces of drywall were not cut very straight at all. I have since filled in these 5 ft long gaps with drywall, but there are noticeable gaps up to 1/2" in some places.

I haven't put the joint compound to float these areas yet. I'm just wondering if I should start over. What should I do?

 

Buy a bag of 5 min setting compound, mix a little up in a pan and fill those gaps before you tape. let it dry then tape.

 

I don't know what you should do but I would probably fill the gaps to just below the surface with a hard setting material such as Fixall and then use drywall mud over the top to make it all smooth. I've never worked with a setting type drywall mud so that might be an alternative to Fixall. I will say that Fixall gets extremely hard and quite difficult to sand smooth and that is the reason I said to keep it slightly below the surface.

 

I've never used Fixall but it sounds a little bit like Durabond. Normally you prefil the gaps, let it dry, then tape. Setting compounds speed up the process and can be applied thicker than regular j/c. If you post a pic or two it may alter or confirm our advice.

 

I sort of lied in recommending Fixall. It seems that the name was changed some years ago to Fix-it-All. (Fix-It-All® Patching Compound) I don't recall if it was always manufactured by Custom Building Products but the green coloring on the box or bag is very familiar to me. Since it is manufactured in California it may be primarily a Western US product. It is similar to Durham's "rock hard" water putty which would also be a material I might use. Depending on how mixed, Fixall has a pot life of about ten to twenty minutes and after application is hard within an hour or two although I like to wait overnight in most cases before getting really physical with the patch.

 

Durabond is tough to sand but Durham's RockHard Putty is a lot harder to sand! No matter what you use it's best to apply it in a manner where no sanding is needed, but then I never was overly fond of sanding

 

Which is why I specified to fill the gap to just below the surface. Let it harden and then use all-purpose drywall mud to finish.