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.