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.