We have a new champion!

It's official: drywalling is the new worst job EVER.

And with that in mind, I'm going to tell you how I really feel about it.

The next paragraph is not intended for children, the elderly, or my mom. If you're uncomfortable with coarse language, just skip it entirely. If, on the other hand, you bear a morbid fascination for general cursing, and want to get a sense of how much I really hate drywall, go ahead and highlight it to read.

I've thought better of it and removed my little curse-fest. Mostly because it doesn't really fit with the usually genial nature of the blog, and partly because my mom might decide to read this bit. (Hi Mom!) But if you want to hear me recite the whole thing, feel free to drop by anytime before we finish the drywall...

Ah. I feel so much better. Now that's out of the way, how about a mid-week update?

Last night we decided to head back into the bathroom and have another go at the piece of drywall on the left side of the bathroom door. I dunno if I mentioned, but the last time we cut it, we completely munged the placement of the cutouts and had to start all over. Well, this time didn't go any fuc... er, any darn better. (Ok, so maybe the swearing isn't completely out of my system.)

We measured carefully, and cut the piece just as carefully - so you can imagine our "surprise" when it didn't quite fit. It seemed a tad long, so we took it back out of the bathroom, and I carefully trimmed a little bit off the top. Then we hoisted it back into place... and it was a little bit too short. Okay, it was a lot too short. Short enough that, yes, we had to chuck the piece and start over.

It was about at this point that we looked at each other and wondered aloud whether we should just hire somebody to do the rest of the job for us. It was seriously that demoralizing.

Rather than give up, however, we soldiered on and decided to tackle another piece instead. Of course, we picked another of the more difficult pieces - the big one running across the top half of the bathroom wall that backs onto the workshop. The one with two cutouts in it - one of which was round. (Octagonal, actually, but who's counting?)

I won't bore you with the details, or inflict further accounts of the swearing involved, but suffice to say that by the time we finally got it into position (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), it was ten after eleven. And it still sort of looked like shit.

So you can probably imagine how amazingly eager we were to get back to it tonight, what with the "success" of last night's effort, but to our delight and amazement, we managed to get two pieces (one of which was of the more difficult variety) measured, cut, and hung tonight.

Behold, the bathroom is now sealed off from the workshop!





Here's where the bastard piece we just can't get to work is supposed to go:



Check out that awesome ceiling line, eh? It's no freakin' wonder it won't bloody fit...

Anyway, my beer is finished, and I'm going to bed.

Fuck drywall.

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Another weekend, another three pieces of drywall

Good lord, drywall takes forever.

Okay, I'll rephrase:

Good lord, drywall takes us forever.

To be fair, we didn't spend that much time working on the drywall this weekend, what with helping our (future) house-sitter move, picking out bathroom fixtures, making yet another run to Home Despot/Rona, getting groceries, cleaning the house, and spending a couple glorious hours picking through the endless stacks of books at the annual Times Colonist Book Sale.

Even so, it really is taking us an awfully long time to put up the damn wallboard.

On Thursday night, with the War Department out at the opera, I managed to finish off a few of the minor outstanding chores such as putting in the seam joints in the ceiling.

I also filled the gap over the bathroom door with a piece of half-inch plywood:



And trimmed back the edges of the drywall at the outside corners so it wasn't quite flush:



I'm still not sure why our drywall guy wants it like that, but in terms of drywall prep, he's the boss.

I also put up a couple of spacers to keep the stack of drywall far enough away from the wall so that, on Saturday, we could install the drywall on the back of the bathroom wall:



That one corner pretty much sums up everything I hate about drywall. Let me share the pain...

The first piece we put up was the bottom one on the long side back wall of the bathroom). We must have been drinking the good kool-aid at the same time, because that piece went in perfectly, first try. It even had a small cutout for the electrical outlet in the lower left corner, and we got the hole perfectly centered, and not over-sized at all.

And... that's when things started to go downhill in a hurry. We measured and cut the piece to go immediately above that, but for some reason I measured the depth of the cutout (to go around the support beam) a full inch too big. Which meant we had to trim it back to the stud and create another seam for Tony to deal with. (Visible on the right side of the picture above.) My bad, I suppose, but it was damn frustrating.

So we were extra careful with the next piece, to span across the chimney between the back wall of the bathroom and the opening for the door into the workshop. We measured the top and measured the bottom, which were the same, and the right and left, which were the same. "Oh, good," we thought. "Finally, a square piece of drywall." So we carefully measured and cut a fresh piece and maneuvered it into the corner and wiggled it into position.

The piece overlapped the doorway by a good three-quarters of an inch. But this time my measuring/cutting wasn't to blame. Oh, no. It was the fact that the back wall of the bathroom bowed out in the middle, meaning the drywall was tight to the right side in the center of the wall, but left a three-quarter inch gap at the top and bottom. (Also visible in the picture above.)

That's about when we called it a day and went out to the pub for some beers.

Stupid drywall.

Pretty much the only thing this weekend that went to plan was picking up the bathroom fixtures. Not only were they a little less expensive than we were expecting, but the store even had them in stock.

Here's a sneak preview:



Ha ha ha. If I have to suffer, so do you.

Oh, one last thing before I head off to bed and dream of things that (hopefully) aren't drywall-related. If you decide to head down to the Times Colonist Book Sale and browse through the extensive selection of used books, please keep in mind that you will be in close contact with several thousand other book-lovers.

For god's sake, SHOWER FIRST!!! That means YOU, lady with the stank-ass wool sweater and the hippie beads - especially you.
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Drywall. It's no laughing matter.

Good lord, I'm hating the whole drywall experience.

I know I say that about a lot of things, but there was seriously one point today where I had to install some extra nailing edges and it was a relief to just be fiddling with insulation for a little while.

Drywall sucks. Big time.

Still, it wasn't all doom and gloom and copious amounts of swearing. We did manage to accomplish SOME things. Like the time we had a professional tell us our drywall was terrible. Ha ha, we laughed loud and long that day, I tell you! No, really, we did. Partly because we needed to laugh to keep from crying, but mostly because the guy who told us our drywall sucks was the guy we're going to pay to do the mudding and sanding and sanding and sanding for us.

One of the things (among the thousands) about drywall that really bugs us is the amount of waste involved. To keep the number of seams to a reasonable level, you sort of need to use the biggest pieces you can, wherever you can. This leads to piles and piles and piles of cast-off bits of drywall:



Now, the bits DO get recycled (though you have to pay the city to do it, which means that, yes, we are paying for this drywall TWICE), but you have to store all these bits somewhere while you're still working on creating more waste. Which, in turn, leads to a lot of bumped elbows, munged corners, and - of course - swearing.

But we soldier on, and we've managed to finish the entire office area, with the exception of one small piece by the electrical panel, and the back of the left-hand side of the closet opening -- the part you can't see in this picture:



As I might have mentioned, we've hired somebody to do the finishing work on the drywall for us. He was also the one who told us our drywall sucked - though to be honest, not really in so many words. What he said was actually, "I've seen contractors do a worse job than this" and "You did all this framing yourselves? It's well done - very nice." At least, that's what we think he said; his accent's pretty thick.

Okay, so he didn't REALLY say the drywall sucked, and he did compliment me on my framing (yay!), but he also pointed out one problem that we'll have to address: Where the seams in the ceiling cross the floor joists, the drywall isn't very strong, and will crack from the vibrations of people walking on the floor overhead. This is bad - it would mean we'd be forever patching and repainting. We really don't want to do that.

Fortunately, Tony the drywall guy had a solution: insert pieces of plywood into the ceiling at each of the problem seams, and use them to keep the seams tight together. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, yeah, except for the fact that we've already attached the drywall to the ceiling. Oh, no problem, Tony says. Just take out a couple of screws so the drywall will sag down a bit, slide in the piece of plywood (with a screw in it), grab the screw and use it to hold the plywood in place while you screw in a few extra drywall screws. Simple as pie!

Yeah. Not so much.

For starters, I had to take out a lot more than a couple of screws to get the drywall to sag to the point where I could separate the pieces far enough to get a piece of 5/8s plywood into the gap, and even then, I couldn't figure out how to get the piece all the way into the ceiling when it had a great big bloody screw jutting out of the middle of it.

Fortunately, my momma didn't raise no stupid children (well, except for my sister... and that dozy brother of mine) and I eventually figured out a solution (yes, with the War Department's help). I drilled a hole through the middle of the plywood, stuck through a piece of stiff wire, and twisted the end into a semblance of a knot. With the wire fastened to the plywood, I could bend it out of the way, slide the plywood into the gap, and then use the wire to pull the plywood back so it was centered over the seam, overlapping each side equally. I could then haul on the wire to keep the plywood in place while I sank in a couple of screws.

Here's what the ceiling looked like when I finished the first row of seam reinforcements:



Kinda reminds me of the Little Shop of Horrors...

Just for good measure, I took a picture of one of the new seams, too:



I just have to snip off the wire and then I can push it up into the ceiling and leave it.

So, that's about the extent of it. We did get started on the bathroom drywall this afternoon, but for some reason the very first piece we cut was completely fubar. Wasn't even close.

Needless to say, that was somewhat disheartening, so we just worked on some other, more minor things for the rest of the day. We'll get back to it tomorrow, though.

So, yeah. Long story short: drywalling sucks. The end.


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There's nothing funny about drywall

I tried to come up with an entertaining title for this post, I really did. The problem is that, when you get right down to it, there's just nothing entertaining or remotely funny about drywall. It sucks that much. It's like a black hole of humor. Say anything funny or try to crack a joke around drywall, and the gypsum will suck it right out of the air, while the person you were talking to just stands there with a quizzical look on their white-dusted face.

Try it. I dare ya.

Anyway, we've been spending our evenings and weekends putting up drywall for a little more than a week now, and there's really only one thing that keeps me going: the knowledge that we've decided to hire someone else to do the mudding. I don't care what it costs - I ain't doing it myself. He's coming over on Tuesday night to give us an estimate, but I assure you, it's just a formality. If he's willing to do it, he can name his price.

With drywall being the sucking black hole of non-comedy that it is, I don't really have anything funny to say, so I'll just put up some pictures and go back to what I was doing (watching the Canucks do their impersonation of drywall - yuk yuk yuk).

Here's the soon-to-be-built-in bookcase:



And here it is from the other side:



Oh, and before you start posting snarky comments about how big some of the gaps are, the drywall guy even SAID we could get away with a fair bit of "amateur" effort if we had a professional mudder, so nyaah.

Oh, and I managed to get the hole cut into the cold air return for the office before calling it a day:



So, sorry about the lack of my trademark "wit", but like I said, drywall just isn't very entertaining.

Oh, right! I mentioned something last time about the hammer drill issue. I should probably explain.

See, ever since we started this little project, we've been using Steve's hammer drill because we don't have one of our own. Now, Steve's hammer drill is a perfectly serviceable hammer drill - for your average homeowner. Sadly, it wasn't exactly designed for the shit and abuse that I was putting it through, and it kinda stopped working so hot. The motor still works and everything, but the chuck kinda doesn't really grip the bits very well, and the teeth and key are worn down so much that it's impossible to tighten.

So... well, we bought Steve a new hammer drill. One that's just as good as the one we wrecked. But we couldn't exactly go and buy Steve a new hammer drill and then turn around and use it before he even got a chance to lay eyes on it. Not to mention that I'd probably destroy it anyway, and then we'd have to buy him ANOTHER one.

So while we were buying Steve a new hammer drill, well, we kinda bought ourselves a little present. Something a little more heavy-duty... just to help with all the TapCons we have left to do, you know?



Ain't she pretty?
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Fun with math, part two

As I've probably mentioned before, I'm really not that great at math, especially when it involves fractions (or decimals, or addition, or division -- anything with numbers, really). Sadly, putting up drywall requires a great deal of math, particularly when each piece of gypsum needs to be cut to fit an uneven wall with holes for electrical outlets and whatnot.

That being said, we have learned a few things that make the math a little less onerous. A little.

One of the things that helps, and generally helps avoid having to recut TOO many pieces, is to base all of the measurements for a piece of drywall on one corner (or at least a specific side) of the wall on which it's going to hang. The amount of drywall we're already wasting is bad enough as it is; we really don't want to create any more than we have to:



So on Wednesday night, we had already put up a couple of pieces and cut out the big window, and figured we could do one more before calling it a night. The next piece in the queue, however, was something of a tricky one, being as it wasn't QUITE a full four feet wide, required a hole for an electrical outlet (of course), and had a big cutout in the top to leave room for the electrical panel.

Forging on, the War Department got in there with a tape measure and started singing out the measurements while I grabbed a marker and faithfully recorded everything on the nearest available surface - which happened to be a piece of rigid foam insulation:



I think you can tell from looking at it what we were up against. I had some concerns, but we grabbed a fresh piece of drywall and started scoring, cutting, snapping, and sawing away. Once in a while, as we shaped the piece to fit, I would surreptitiously grab a tape measure and check the measurements.

I didn't think it looked too good for our heroes.

But we pressed on, and got the length cut, then the width, then the little cutout, and finally formed the hole for the electrical outlet. By this time, however, I was so convinced that the piece was totally out of whack that I didn't even bother to score the lines for the outlet hole, but just hacked it out quick and dirty with the drywall saw. Finally, there was nothing left to do but drag the piece over to the corner and hoist it up into place.

Call me a monkey's jesus, but the damn thing fit like a glove. First time, no trimming:



So, yeah. Maybe we're getting better, or maybe my math sucks so much that I can't even correctly measure a piece that's actually going to fit just right.

Anyway, we took last night off from drywalling to address the hammer drill issue, but I think it's all coming along okay:



And yes, we had a hammer drill issue. More on that next time.

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Some interesting, little-known facts about drywall

Now that we are fully engaged* in the task of covering up all that hard work I did on the framing, we're starting to find out some interesting things that we really didn't know about drywall.

That's not to say that they're things we necessarily wanted to know about drywall, but things that we've just come to know through the course of the monotonous, soul-crushing drudgery that is drywalling.

It's almost enough to make one wish there was still some digging to do instead...

Okay, I exaggerate - somewhat. I'd still rather be drywalling than digging, but only because there are markedly fewer wasps when working inside. And more supervisor kitties that look really funny when they've been sniffing around in the drywall dust. Hee.

So, the first thing we learned about drywall is that it's really damn hard to get into the house. Drywall sheets are usually (always?) sold in pairs, which is fine for loading them into the truck, but not so good for maneuvering them in through the side door, part-way up the stairs into the kitchen, and then down the stairs, over the dryer, and into the basement. It's a veritable obstacle course of tricky corners and annoying edges of sharp things - or sharp edges of annoying things, as the case may be. Getting ten sheets of drywall from the store is a major undertaking, and we learned that the hard way when we bought 16 at one time to do the ceiling.

Another interesting thing we learned about drywall is that the stuff they sell at Home Depot sucks. I think the name brand is Sheetrock, and they call it that because naming it Shitrock would be a dead giveaway. I don't know what exactly they do differently, but the paper tears more easily, the gypsum itself seems crumbly and mushy, and it never seems to snap in a clean line. The stuff from Rona, on the other hand, feels more rigid (making it easier to carry)and has much sturdier paper for the same price. The moral of the story is to buy ProRoc drywall from Rona: it has the official Don and Amy's Basement Reno Seal of Approval^TM.

And finally, before we get to the pictures, we learned one other important thing about drywall: it's a lot damn harder to put up than it looks on TV. You'd think it's just a matter of propping the board up against the wall and chucking in a few screws, but lemme tell ya, Jack, that ain't it. That ain't it at all.

Okay, sure, maybe it IS that easy if you're working in a room with square walls, an even floor, and a number of windows, plugs, and light fixtures that doesn't exceed the gross domestic product figure of several small European countries. In our basement, however, every single piece needs to be trimmed, cut, scored, blasphemed, measured, tossed out, sworn at, scored, cut, holed, fitted, trimmed, re-holed, tested, cursed at, and then finally screwed in place (accompanied, of course, by the requisite swearing).

Here's how it looked on Sunday night, after two days of work:



Yes, two days. It takes FOREVER... Oh, and not included in that picture was the bathroom ceiling, which we managed to finish with the much appreciated help of Clamb (who needs to work on his swearing a little if he's going to fit in on our job site).

I took these two last night, after another four hours of effort over two evenings:





Did I mention it takes FOREVER?

And yes, there ARE two colors of drywall. The stuff from Home Depot even LOOKS greyer and uglier and just plain crappy.

Oh, and just because it's been a while, it's another edition of everyone's favorite feature

The Injury Report

Strictly speaking, this particular injury didn't happen while working in the basement, but was probably a direct result of being really tired after a full day of drywalling.

I have five splotches on the back of my left hand: two rather large, and three smaller ones. They look kind of like liver spots, but they're quite red, rather than the usual brown.

The source of said spots? Well, let's just say that when you're searing a nice piece of halibut in a pan of hot oil and butter, make sure that when you go to turn it over, you're flipping it AWAY from you.

That's some free advice from me to you, right there. And yes, you get what you pay for.






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* Ha ha. It's a pun. Get it?
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