DIY Mudding

Given that the timing is tight and I need to do something useful, I started helping with the mudding of the walls. Do you know what that is? I didn’t, hence I’ll explain it to everyone that doesn’t know either.

The process of putting together a wall used to entail, in the old days:

• bricks
• mortar
• plaster

You’d take the bricks, put them together with mortar, and then add plaster on top.

In America, where houses are built efficiently and of wood, instead of bricks and mortar, we use wood planks (a.k.a. twobyfours or 2×4 because of their cross section, two by four inches). A frame is built of wood, and then it needs to be covered with something.

{moszoomimglink:Dirty staircase}That something used to be chicken wire covered in layers of plaster. That was a lot of work, and you had to layer and layer the plaster until you finally had a wall. Now things are more efficient, and you can buy a layered plaster wall section, which is called a dry wall. You cut the dry wall to shape, screw it to the wooden frame, and there you have a wall.

The next thing you have to do, though, is make the wall smooth. The screws make little dips in the wall, and are ugly on their own, so they have to get covered with something. That something is called mud. Looks more like silly putty to me, but it’s still all good.

So, yesterday I started spreading the mud on the screw holes for most of the afternoon. A tedious job, but fortunately one that is done rapidly. If it weren’t for the fact that the house is friggin’ enormous and it has more dry wall than Windsor Castle. I did the Hilo bedroom, then the Hilo bathroom, then I started upstairs and did another couple of walls – but all in all, I had little to show for my three hours of mudding.

At least, I showed folks around here that I do work for a living!