Spare Room Wall Damage

Like our brethren elsewhere, our house also needs a quality spare room for guests. We had to replace some bad drywall for that to happen. Before we lived in the house there was a leak near the chimney. The leak has been long repaired, as was the damaged beam because of it. However, the old beam shifted and pushed through the ceiling. We couldn't really tell that when we bought the house--the drywall just looked like it needed to be replace.

For the past month and a half I've been working s-l-o-w-l-y working on this problem. I removed the drywall myself. You can kinda see where the damage is on the wall in the picture below.

Then Jeremy cut the beam with a borrowed reciprocating saw so that we could lay the drywall flat against the ceiling. Without doing this laying the drywall would've been a no-go.

All of the work in the rest of this post requires a great deal of talent and skill that I do not possess. I cut and put the drywall up myself. I just used a little utility knife--so that's why the edges of the drywall aren't perfect. The wood behind the drywall is also not perfect, so one of the panels sits 1/4 back from where it's supposed to. I probably should have purchased one piece of thicker drywall, but I didn't think about that until I was spackling.

So, you can see that my spackling/mudding/ick it not as smooth as it could be. I'm going to let this muck dry and then put a smoother coat on top before I prime.

 It looks a bit better now--but still not wonderful.