Drywall Party, Day 0

Last night, my Dad came into town and we started getting the basement ready for the drywalling today. As soon as my son was in bed (and crying about it, because he wanted to play downstairs in the unfinished rooms), we headed down to hang the insulation.

Before I started this project, I kind of just assumed that insulation came in big rolls and you cut it to length as you needed it. Obviously, that would be too easy and result in little waste, so instead they package it in rolls, but it comes pre-cut into seven foot long “batts.” If you’re dealing with more or less than seven feet of wall cavity, you have to cut them to fit, and find something to do with the waste. I got two cavities filled per batt, and about eight inches left over on each. I’m tempted to stuff them up into the ceiling as we put the drywall up as a sort of soundproofing, but I’m worried that it might make the room a little too isolated, thermally.

So, instead, I’ll just see if I can find someone who needs my leftovers. Incidentally, we went through about a roll and a third, give or take, on the two rooms.

And now we’re waiting for the drywall itself to arrive. I have to run and grab a couple more things before we can start, and the real work will probably wait until my brothers show up around noon.

Drywall Party, Day 1

So, the day started off awesome. Before my brothers arrived, my Dad and I worked on making sure we had corners in place to hang the drywall on and I finished running my low voltage and coaxial cable TV wiring. The brothers ended up running a little late, but that wasn’t a problem because Lowe’s only brought half of my drywall order. They brought the 12 8′ slabs of drywall, but not the 21 12′ slabs.

Why?

Because the person I talked to on the phone rang it up wrong. She rang up the 8′ for delivery, and the 12′ for pick-up. Le sigh.

Turned out not to be that big of a deal since the guy who delivered the load had me last on the schedule and he could run right back to the store and pick up the rest and bring it back. It even got here before my brothers did.

That’s it there in my backyard. It’s setting on some skids so as not to rest in the dewy grass. We got started around 2pm, then, and had the ceilings up by dinner time, with the exception of an odd-shaped chunk in the bedroom, and the ceilings in the closets.

Process went something like this: Bring in one sheet and put it face down on a pair of sawhorses. Measure the length and cut, then measure the location of fixtures in the ceiling and cut for those, usually with a Dremel. Each ceiling panel that we put up today, in fact, had some kind of fixture in it somewhere. Once cut, we flipped the panel over and measured and drew lines for the joists, so we could easily follow along on the underside and zip the screws in pretty quickly.

Then flip it again and my Dad and I raised it up, since my brothers are a little too short to be able to get it up and flush against the joists. However, they stood by with a couple of T braces made of 2×4 and wedged those in under the ceiling panels, holding them in place and freeing us all up to drive drywall screws. Occasionally we had to break out a regular screwdriver to push in the obstinate ones, but otherwise it was a pretty quick process with two cordless drills going.

From there we moved to the walls in the office. We got the upper half of three walls done, and all of another section, when my wife declared it was bedtime for Tony and time to stop using power tools. So we moved on to mudding what we had already finished. This stuff will need to dry for 24 hours before we can sand it and apply a second coat, so it’s critical to get it going as soon as possible. If we hadn’t needed my youngest brother to help with the ceilings he probably would have been following along mudding as we went.

This is my brother Joe taking some mud from a makeshift hod. He’s mudding a taped seam along the ceiling. The advantage for us in using 12′ panels for the ceilings was that, with rooms 11′ by 11′, they gave us the fewest seams, and those are often the most troublesome when going to sand and such in preparation for painting.

More walls tomorrow.