How to Cut Drywall by HomeAdditionPlus.com
Hi, I am Mark Donovan from HomeAdditionPlus.com and today, I am going to show you some tips on how to cut drywall.
First to cut drywall, you need a sharp utility knife. Make sure you put a new blade in there everytime you are going to start a drywall project. Second, you need a keyhole saw. This is used before cutting around the outlets or switch boxes in the drywall prior to hanging it on the walls. With this particular utility tool for drywall, it also includes a rasp. This is useful for smoothing the edges of a cut in the drywall after you have made the cut. To cut a large section of a drywall, draw a straight line down length the board using a straight edge. There are large four foot T-squares that are perfectly meant for drywall work. But if you are doing a small project of any type of straight edge, I am using a here and just basically run your line down length of the board.
Once you have made your line on the piece of drywall – use a straight edge such as 2 x 4 or if you have a T-square, even better – and then just put the 2 x 4 or straight edge up against the line. Use your utility knife and you are going to score the surface of the front surface inside of the dry wall. You do not have to go too deep. All right, now that we have scored the front surface of the drywall, we are basically just going to take this one and hit the back of the board so that we snap the board on the line. And you can see that we got a nice clean cut. We put it at about 45 or 90-degree angle. Take our utility knife and then just go at the back of the board along the line you just made from the angle of the two sections of the board. We will just knife this out using a utility knife and we have got a clean cut.
To smooth out the edges of this cut board, we are going to use a rasp and just scratch it up the edge of the drywall. And with that, we are ready to install it on the wall. To cut off our outlets and switches, we mark the dimensions of the rough opening of the outlet box and then we use our keyhole saw and we point it along the line of the marked area of the hole. Once we planted that in, we just work our way along these edges of the line and there we go, we have our opening for our outlet or switch. Now, we could have used the router that is coming very common with professionals nowadays, or if you do not have it, a keyhole saw is perfect. It has been used in the past for many decades. To trim a small section of the drywall, say quarter of an inch, we can use our utility knife and our finger as a guide along the edge of the drywall and then just run it with the length of the board. We then repeat the process on the backside of the board. Again, using the utility knife to score the back surface of the drywall and our fingers again as the guide, we run it with the length of the board. Now once we have scored both sides of the drywall, we can now snap it with our hands and fingers and we will do this with the whole length. Once we have snapped the drywall, we can use our rasp again to clean up the edges of the drywall. And again, with the rasp being done, we are ready to install on the wall.
So those are the basics in cutting drywall. Again, you need a sharp utility knife, you need a keyhole saw with a rasp, you need a straight edge. If you have any other home improvement questions, visit us at HomeAdditionPlus.com today.
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