A little secret to making your bucket of drywall mud smooth and very easy to apply. No more bouble holes to refill and makes finishing alot easier.

Well if your a do it yourself er like i am. Its great to know tricks of the trade. And I know allot of them.

      When doing finish drywall. The mud or plaster you will get from the local hardware store will be just fine. The lighter the weight the less shrinkage. Meaning less cracking and faster dry time. The usually go buy color code. Like middle weights lid on the bucket is Purple. That is the most common plaster/mud we use. The Blue lid is the ligthtest they have witch means almost no shrinking or cracking. Very soft and smooth . I always use Blue on the finish coat. Some older guys like using the green lid. Know this is the heavy est. Its use in a 3 step application and the shrinking and cracking is very high. I do NOT use the Green lid. Its a pain and it wast time. With the 1st Taping coat Purple and second coat Blue. you will save your self a hole day of work if not more. Using a 2 step application and then ready to sand and feather in.
 So when you get the plaster/mud that you want. Take the lid off and there will be a plastic cover over the mud. To keep it from drying out. Take it out and keep it so you can reuse it. Then what you want to do is take your 4" mud knife and scrape the top layer off about 1 to 2 " and through it away. That way you don't have any hard peaces in your good mud. So know its time to mix up the mud this is were the TRICK comes into play.  I all ways add water to it know matter if you think it needs it or not. So put about 2 cups of water into the bucket. To mix the mud i use a mixing paddle that is mad for this very thing. you can pic them up at your local hardware store. Now your going to need a drill to attach the paddle to. It has a long neck so you can get at the bottom of the bucket. Know that's all set up your going to need The SECRET TRICK you get some DAWN dish soap AND PUT SOME INTO YOUR MUD. I would say about 1" to 1 1/2" out of the bottle. Now you can SLOWLY start to mix the mud water and soap together. you will be doing this for about 10 min. While this is being done you Will be able to see the bubbles coming up to the top witch means its pushing out the air that's in the mud. Now that that's all done. Your plaster/mud will be nice to handle and very smooth. And it will have a nice smell. But the best thing is no sanding out bubbles and no extra time and money wasted. And that's how i prep my drywall plaster/mud.