Hanging drywall

Re: Hanging drywall


You are special people. Hanging drying drywall is difficult to explain in this forum. Especially without illustrations. Try this site.
http://www.doityourself.com/

Follow a DIY link for the basic process. I've done taping and mudding while my hub secured the drywall - but a while ago now. Simple, yes, even fun as you see a room transformed. Harder with the ceiling. Beats matching plaid wallpaper on the ceiling though. (I did that once in the seventies, seriously ugly after all the effort. Some time later that became the maple sugar with ivory trim room....) Years later, I fixed up our garage as a studio, added beams, and drywalled again, this time by myself. Bunch of work by oneself. Fun, though.

On the wiring et al, I like having a studfinder to double check, and mine signals when there is AC - I do that when hanging paintings, for example, especially in this illbegotten house in NM - but I tend to hang paintings using the studs. Mark the studs as you go, like 2packs said.

The link I just looked at on Doityourself.com was helpful, but there are probably many more links out there. Taunton Fine Homebuilding might be worth looking at, if noone mentioned it before.

I recently had other folks put up a wall of about eight feet wide, eight tall, in my house here in the southwest, and found mudding grit all over the place for quite a while afterwords. I'm all for using masks, good masks, as misery making as they are, at sanding time, and afterwards. A vacuum is a handy device...

You sounded like you were really experts of this stuuf. But then why did you have someone else put up a wall.

I'm sixty five year old woman, snookered, and not the fittest person on the block. I'm allowed to do that, I trust?

I suppose. If that is the story you are sticking too.

Are you being funny or obnoxious?

As to expert, I've never been a contractor, and licensed general contractors of at least average abillity gain a lot of knowledge the rest of us don't accumulate over the years. On the other hand, I'm a landscape architect and know design fairly well, thus my decision to put the wall up in the first place.

I'm all for what JPB and family are doing...

Hah, we mentioned the same link - and it may have been linked before by another on this thread. Makes sense, it was first or so on google.

I didn't read all the links. Gus got me into it, all he said was it is simple and offered nothing else.
I've used dyi for years. Did you google it?

Yes, I did. I thought it was helpful. Didn't go back and look at links others gave, though - we might be late to mentioning it. I also didn't look much further, thinking 2packs has a handle on all this.

Finehomebuilding can be near esoteric, but I've saved various copies of the magazine, which I can ill afford. Taunton.com and their offshoot, Finehomebuilding, is often an interesting site, though, re just how to build, say, a spiral staircase....

Eh...drywall, is like most things, if the previous stage of construction, studs in this instance, are in their proper place, then the rock should go up fairly easy. In my neck of the woods, a lot of the houses, mainly those in the country, were often built by farmhands during the winter months. I'm sure you can imagine some of the...well crazy crap we run into trying to work on these houses....nothing is square, level, plumb...etc...they tend to be nightmares.

The walls in these older homes are built with wood lath and plaster, they would often cut the lath to reach from one corner of a room to another, so setting studs at any kind of consistent interval, was not a requirement...totally random is commonplace. Random studs to do not work well with uniform rock, it's either restud {partially} the wall or cut, cut, cut...cutting leaves butt joints.

Some sheetrock screws throw slivers constantly, and once they get imbedded into the finger, it becomes difficult to grab/grip the screws...like little needles poking you every time you touch something. To help with this, you can wrap tape on the thumb and the index finger, some guys use electrical tape {the black stuff} but I find it to be too slick, and it does not bend well, so I use surgical tape..flexible and grippy.

If you do end up hanging a ceiling, and you don't have a lift, which is usually the case, there are a few things you can do to help with that as well. Since the ceiling goes up first {should go up first} you can nail or screw a 2x4 to the wall studs making a shelf for one end or edge of the rock to rest on, then reposition it as you move along. You can also make a "T" brace...it's just a long 2x fixed to a short one to make a T...then use it to hold the rock up instead of just using your arms. The T needs to be slightly longer than the distance from floor to ceiling, so you can wedge it in place, you will still have to hold it though, but it's a lot easier....after a bit of practice. If you are lucky enough to have plenty of people around, just rotate them as holders....and you might try to eat a banana afterwards...muscles that you never knew existed will ache.

If I think of anything else, I'll throw it up here.

Yeh, I figured our gallery, which was the front room of our landscape design space, was a rhomboid plus. Built in 1880 or so, the building had seen much - if the walls could talk. Close to a 15' high ceiling. The floor had a crown sloping to the sides, not evenly. The sides were cattywampus. The joists below were suspect - and we shored them up in immediate problem areas - while the wood floor, red fir, was ridden with, I forget the term, post beetles. (new to me then, being from So Cal) We hung paintings with a several foot level.... That is, after we added studwalls here and there.

We had a fire next door hit our building as well. I am mixing up the fires. One was from a celebration rocket from the bay... that one didn't get us,
and one was assigned to arson, either from the transients next door, or from nefarious others. It was the second that really affected our space.

So, listen, I don't haul drywall now, but am not without experience.

JPB, I assume that they will be providing tools but if not I have an extra drill, bits, razor knife, etc... that you can borrow. Just let me know.

'Powder post beetles' was the phrase I was after.

Still thinking, shop vac.

You guys are the greatest!

snookered, thanks for the link and for the support. S'ok re: gus - we're cool.

osso, if I get some experience with this stuff, I'll help you anytime (now wouldn't that be a sight). And you're right, a shop vac might make a nice belated Christmas present for this lady if she doesn't already have one.

2packs - you're amazing. Thanks so much for your advice and tips, I've printed it all (along with some of the stuff from the links). Each house in the area is in a different state of disrepair. During the gutting projects, most were taken down to the studs, some were partial guts, and some had to be abandoned altogether because the frame was disintegrating around the crew. I'm not sure exactly what condition this particular house is in, or how uniformly it was built to begin with, but we're pretty much prepared for anything. Thanks for ideas on what to look out for <adds surgical tape to shopping list>.

sublime - thank you, I appreciate the offer. We have a drill we can bring along <still mulling it over>, but I don't want to mess with getting razors through the airport security (even in checked baggage). We'll see what they have for tools and then buy what we need when we get there. Mr B has ended up buying assorted things the previous two times he was there and then donating the items to the facilitators when he left. Even though we aren't working through a group this time, we can always drop things off a CGC for their on-going projects.

gus - I'll keep a sharp eye out for Ignatius and I always eat at least one Lucky Dog when I'm in NO :wink:

update --

She isn't quite ready for the drywall so we'll spend Wednesday helping her rip out her bathroom fixtures and tile. Then she hopes to be ready for us to help her again with the drywall by Monday.

Ripping out we can do. Hanging drywall? We'll see.

JPB--

Flunking drywall doesn't mean that your worthless--except as a carpenter's apprentice.

An update -- A few weeks before we got there she discovered that there was mold behind the drywall and she would have to gut the lower four feet from every room. It's just her and her mom working on the house so it's slow going and they weren't ready to put up new drywall yet. Her uncle is a contractor and gives her advise, but he is overwhelmed with work and can't give her much on-site time. She and her mom take turns working on each other's houses, one week at a time. She also spends one day each week volunteering at another construction project to get training and hands-on experience for the things she's doing -- and providing help to others along the way. fishin asked earlier about finding ways to help out... This is the group that she works for when she's not working on her own house.

Anyway, beneath the drywall there were three layers of wallpaper. Under the last layer was a layer of burlap over wooden plank walls (or barge boards). There were no studs, just drywall over the existing wallpaper. The house was built around the turn of the last century and it was fascinating to see the history of the house revealed in the different layers of wallpaper. It was especially surprising to see the burlap and we guessed that it was applied in order to have a smooth surface for hanging the paper, or perhaps to provide a slight insulating effect. There was no other insulation.

I spent Wednesday pulling out drywall and baseboards with her mom while she and Mr B worked on taking down the kitchen cabinets. Mr B was particularly handy for doing some heavy lifting. We made some good progress although it was slow going. She had another friend arriving from NY on Monday, so I worked on rehanging some windows with her mom while she and her friend tackled another room of gutting. Mr B pulled down much of the kitchen ceiling and pulled up most of the tile flooring, just leaving a pass through path to the back door at this point. Now I know how to rehang old double-hung windows

After taking some time to clean up, we met again last night at the apartment she's temporarily sharing with her mom for some delicious gumbo and good talk. They hope to be able to move into her mom's house in another month or two.

She was working in NYC at the time of the storm and had bought the house only the month before. She was intending on returning to NO at some point and was planning on using the house as rental property until she returned. Fortunately, there was no one living in it at the time of the storm. In March of this year she decided to quit her job in NY and return to NO to rebuild her house. She's currently renting out her place in NY. There's a certain amount of irony there. She still has a lot of work to do, but there is no doubt in my mind that she'll keep at it until it's done. We'll surly keep in touch and it wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear Mr B say that he wants to spend more time in NO this summer giving them a hand.

I've sent down the links and tips on drywalling from this thread. She hadn't heard about doing the ceiling first and appreciated the input. Thanks to all for the tips and encouragement.

kudos to all of you, and gumbo for us readers of the thread...

Very interesting, JPB.
[Burlap is/was used here only when restaurating walls: in timbered house, to prevend the adobe from drying to fast.]

And I think it's phascinating how the volunteer help (still) works - both there in New Orleans as well as from Illinois foreigners :wink: