Drywall repair: Paper tape or mesh tape?

Drywall repair is about turning the highly visible (a hole or crack) into the highly invisible—a wall or ceiling that looks like the rest of the wall or ceiling. Without getting hugely torqued off or doing a terrible job.

Soon after this drywall repair video posted, someone asked: Do you prefer paper tape or mesh tape?

Short answer: Paper. It takes a tiny bit more know-how to use. But using it makes repairing drywall a huuuuuge bit better.

The lure of mesh tape, in my experience, is that it’s tacky and sticks to the wall without a ‘bed coat’. Theoretically this saves a step, but in practice, not so much. The reason is that unlike paper tape, mesh tape is thick by comparison. This means you have to build up compound to cover it. And the more you build it up, the further out into the field of drywall you need to feather the joint compound to make it disappear.

And the more compound you use, the more you have to sand. Since mesh tape can be exposed and damaged by over-sanding just as easily as paper tape, in my experience, there really is no advantage.

When it comes to drywall repair, joint compound and sanding, less is more.

Two exceptions: A drywall patch (aka ‘bullet patch’) where you use a piece of drywall itself as the patch and the tape; and Hyde’s Wet ‘N Set which is a hybrid mesh/bed-coat that sets up fast and flat and eliminates the bed coat step in many repairs.

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