I have slung more drywall mud in my life than I care to think about. My messed-up shoulders will attest to that. I am quite sure that the amount of the goop I have spread around with a trowel is in the thousands if not tens of thousands of gallons. I have spent many hours clunking around on stilts. In fact, I was on stilts when the wave of the 2001 Nisqually earthquake moved through the house I was working on. When I got out of the house the telephone poles and wires were still waving. I had gotten pretty comfortable going up and down stairs on stilts.
One of the things you learn pretty quickly about drywall mud is that it takes forever to dry if it is installed too thick–especially if the weather is humid. Building up successive thin layers creates a much better job than trying to push-the-river with too much material.
Generally when you needed to do a heavy fill you would mix up some of the stuff with a quicker set time. Silverset was one of my favorite types because it sanded pretty easily when dry–unlike some of the other brands that set up more like concrete. In the early days of my drywalling career there was only stuff that set up so hard you could barely sand it.
After discovering the light-weight products, we used to call “mud-lite,” life became much easier. There was Silverset 20, Silverset 40 and Silverset 90. The numbers referred to the number of minutes you had to work with the material before it solidified in your bucket–and several times I got to experience the reality of these numbers.
Everyone remembers fooling around with Plaster of Paris–well these fast setting joint compounds are a bit like that–just not nearly as hard when set.
I had a flash back at an inspection and my shoulder understandably started to hurt.
Someone could have benefited from knowing about Silverset 90–and a little bit better understanding of electricity might have been advisable as well.
Perhaps this was just their version of “mud-light.”
By Charles Buell, Real Estate Inspections in Seattle
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