We decided to get rid of a doorway to make the space more open between the kitchen and the dining room. There used to be swinging cowboy doors here and we obviously removed those. Then, we were left with an unnecessary door frame which we decided to remove and make the space more open. You gain a couple of inches in each direction – I love it!!!! See how the old frame was so yellow? Yuck! This saved me from having to paint it but now we actually have some work with drywalling but it’s so worth it! Well, we’ll see after we drywall it if I’m still saying that! :-p We are planning to redo all the flooring here so it’s ok that there’s a gap there in the floor.
This is the mud we bought – save yourself some pain and buy the 90 minute dry stuff (not 45 minute) – it takes some time and you don’t want to have to throw a bunch away because it thickens or hardens while you work.
Step 1: Pry off the doorway trim. You’ll want to score the sides so that the paint doesn’t get pulled off with it.
Step 2: Measure the distance of each section of the doorway to cut the dry wall out. You’ll want the drywall to reach the end on each side so that you can put the corners on properly. Screw these pieces of drywall in place.
Step 3: Trim off the edges of the drywall with a box cutter where they are sticking out too far – this is so the corners will fit properly.
This is what it should look like with the drywall properly secured.
Step 4: Put on the corners. We chose metal straight edged corners with dry wall tape on them. We thought about rounded corners but I like the sharp lined look. You’ll want to thin out the mud more than we did here. We bought 45 minute dry mud but we should’ve bought the 90 minute dry mud so it wouldn’t get so thick so fast. You put a thin layer of mud on the wall first and then attach the corner to the mud, then put more mud over the corner. You can staple the corner into place at the top so that it doesn’t slide down.
I didn’t take a picture of it, but at the top corners, you put a piece of drywall tape and fold it into the corner and mud it into place to cover the crack there. Then, after that you’ll have to do several layers of mud all over to make sure all the areas are flat and not concave and smooth (that’s the hard part). Then, comes the sanding to ensure it’s extra smooth because there’s really no way to get it extra smooth without sanding unless you are a professional which we are not. :-p I kept joking with Bryon that this was actually my sculpting project because I am not so good at mudding. I’m not a perfectionist. Several times, I made a stegasaurus on the wall that had to be sanded off. This requires lots of patience. Final product below:
