When you buy after clicking a link on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. My Skim Coating Nickname is Mr.The DIY Fix is reader supported.DIY Plaster Repair: We Finally Put the Skim in Skim Coat - this post.How To Fix Plaster Like a Boss: Sand Baby Sand.Plaster Repair Part 2: Laying a New Brown Coat.Plaster Buttons to Fix Your Crumbling Ceiling.Plaster Repair for DIYers - No Need to Rip It Out.We have a whole series of plaster repair/skim coating posts you should check out if you like this or are trying to tackle the same thing. Who knows, maybe I should go apprentice on the weekends with a master plasterer and learn how I'm really supposed to do this stuff? I've been doing this a while now, but I'm always looking to up my game. If you have any skim coating experience and your own tips or tricks to achieving that glass-like surface, I'd love to hear them. Feel encouraged, it's important, especially since you've still got about 2 more skim coats left before your wall is "done" and ready for paint. After you've completed this first true skim coat the walls and ceiling will start to look really good and smooth, and way way way better than they probably looked when you started. Those are my best tips and tricks for this stage of the game. But it's all up to you and what you're comfortable doing. Then, after a cure on the main walls, I'll come back with a very thin mix and do just the corners. Often when I'm doing a large room I just sort of leave the corners a bit unfinished and full of gaps and imperfections, rather than spending a lot of time on the corners and allowing my compound to cure too much and end up wasted. If you're working with a two sided corner, follow the same principles, and after the first side of the corner has cured (and maybe even after you've sanded), come back through the do the other side. Once I've got the whole corner filled there are ridges and lines all over the place, so I take one fluid top to bottom or bottom to top stroke with the joint knife and remove any excess. I'm a lefty when it comes to work requiring dexterity, so I use my left hand for this when possible, but sometimes you can't force it, so try to wok on using either hand. It also helps if you keep a bucket of water nearby to periodically wet the edges of your tools and wipe them to remove any material buildup. By keeping a wet edge, or by applying more wet compound then immediately scraping it off you greatly improve your surface and reduce the bruising. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's best to avoid it if you can. When this happens the perfect smoothness is lost and you end up with an area that you'll need to sand and fill in later with the next coat. I know it's hard to see, but the bruising is obvious in person. If you let your compound dry out a little bit too much and then scrape the trowel over it, you'll end up with little raised areas that I call "bruising." When working with joint compound one of the best ways to prevent the most common issues is to keep a wet edge, like with painting. I hope the following information goes a long way to ease your process and give you a perfectly smooth and consistent surface. But once you reach these thin coat stages of the process, there's a lot that's gained from basic experience and a few of our tips and tricks that we've picked up over the years. You're throwing the compound on the walls and trying to get a relatively smooth surface, but it ultimately doesn't matter all that much. The first few coats of compound are more brute force than finnesse. The only good way to deal with the imperfections is to prevent them before they happen, or fix them after it's cured (or even after it's partially cured when you can still knock down any ridges with your joint knife). It's imperfect and that's okay, you have more coats and sanding coming up later to fix those imperfections. The more you touch it the more it will get screwed up. Futzing with skim coating imperfections has the same result as messing with a bead of wet caulk.
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