All right, by popular demand, a roommate story.

As you may recall, on moving day, the various people who attempted to get the roommate's couch into the house succeeded in putting a quite nasty hole in the drywall. But then, the roommate's 80-something father used to be a drywaller, so he patched the drywall. The repair is about... hmmmm... eyeballing it, let's say 24" by 16". Or so. And then, since he taught his daughter all she knows about drywalling, he left it to her to tape and mud.

Right.

So the roommate taped (I'm assuming) and then mudded. With a backhoe, by the look of it. She actually covered the ENTIRE PATCH in joint compound, plus the original wall to a distance varying from 6 to 18".

Then...

she put on another coat!!!

The second coat is just as rough as the first, nor did she sand between coats. WTF?? This isn't paint, you know. You have to sand mud between coats. How the fuck do you not know that?

And then...

Nothing. For the next 11 weeks, despite repeated references to the drywall cleverly inserted by me in conversation, she did nothing. Though every time I mentioned it, she mentioned she had done a second coat of mud.

RIGHT. Because I was likely to forget why the wall in the hallway looks like the surface of Mars.

Recently, I went so far as to include the drywall repair as part of a To-Do List I was making for myself, aloud, in front of her. "No, no," said the roommate, "I'll do it." And then she added...

"I did a second coat."

RIGHT.

Ok, so then yesterday, I was prepping the door of the new roommate's room for the new (keyed-entry) doorknob. Therefore I needed to paint the door, therefore I needed to sand the door. And while I had the palm sander out, I decided to sand the psycho mud job as well.

R. I. G. H. T.

First of all, good news! She DIDN'T cover the entire surface of the patch. She missed a few spots. While others are at least 1/4" deep in mud. Great, that's gonna be easy to smooth...

That was the good news. The bad news is, because she mudded way too fast (well duh), there are air pockets EVERYWHERE. The more you sand, the more it looks like the wall has smallpox. FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

And then, of course, like any lousy finisher, she heaped concealer on the parts she was trying to conceal, thus making huge humps everywhere there is tape.

Sigh... Seriously, never before have I considered taking the BELT SANDER to drywall.

So, after 20 minutes with the palm sander, I had the wall down to where...

the tape is starting to show.

Great! I guess I got most of the crap off of it then. It's still full of air bubbles, streaks, dings and gouges, but at least it's almost all off. Enough that I could now FINALLY put on the next coat of mud. But first, time to go to work.

So I start sweeping the dust. "20 minutes of high-speed sanding" worth of drywall dust. Is there a lot of dust? Yes. Yes, there certainly is. Then the dog walked through the dust, for good measure, and tracked evil little white paw prints all over the house. And in the middle of cleaning up all this douchebaggery, the roommate comes downstairs and says to me

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"That stuff's a bitch to clean up, eh?"

Ba-dum ts.