Sanding Drywall Without Dust (or at Least Less Dust!): Four Tips!

Drywall dust can travel all over your home pretty quickly so sanding drywall without dust is the goal! These four tips will help!

I’ve been doing a LOT of sanding over the past several weeks. Sanding the spackled nail holes in our kitchen. Sanding the skim coated textured walls in our dining room. Sanding spackled nail holes at my parents’ house. Sanding. Sanding. Sanding. And I’m not sure which is worse – the tediousness of the sanding or the mess that it makes. I can’t do anything to take away the hatefulness of sanding but I do have a few tips to share that help with the mess! (post contains affiliate links – full disclosure statement available {here})

Tip #1: Hold a dustpan at an angle under the spot that you’re sanding. The sanding dust falls right into the dustpan where it’s a cinch to empty it into the trash. (A rubber edged dustpan does the best job of hugging the wall and catching all of the dust.)

Tip #2: Take a piece of 2″ blue painter’s tape that’s a little longer than the area you’ll be sanding and fold it down about ½″ along the length of the tape (the sticky side should be on the outside of the fold). Stick the ½″ section to the wall under the area that you’re going to sand, creating a horizontal ledge with the remaining 1 ½″ width of tape with the sticky side up:

Now when you sand your spot, the sanding dust will fall onto the sticky painter’s tape. Once you’re done, you can slowly pull the tape off the wall, fold it up, and throw your sanding dust away! 

Tip #3: My third tip is from a reader of the blog, Brenda, who sweetly emailed me with her great tip after reading about my seemingly endless sanding jobs. Simply hold the nozzle of a shop-vac under the spot that you’re sanding and suck up the sanding dust before it ever hits the floor. I tried this trick with various nozzle attachments and the small brush worked best for me.

Tip #4: A final option is to use a dust-free drywall hand sander kit like {this one} from Home Depot that attaches to most brands of shop-type vacuums. You sand with the included drywall screen that’s attached to the hose and the sanding dust gets sucked up as you go. I’ve never used one of these before but they get rave reviews for sanding new drywall. It’s probably not ideal for sanding spackle spots on already painted walls since (in my experience) you don’t get as smooth as a final finish with drywall screens as you do with sandpaper.  

Whichever method you use, don’t forget to wear a dust mask or respirator while sanding – some dust will still be getting into the air and you don’t want that stuff in your lungs.

Finally, a special thanks to my sanding model who has much prettier hands (and sparklier nails!) than her mom:

Once you’re done with your sanding and are ready to paint, don’t forget about my time-saving tips for lazy painter’s that you’ll find {here}. Enjoy the weekend everyone!