Working with Drywall for the First Time

We had quite the full day today. Early in the AM, I ran a load of things to the storage unit. Then, Liz and I had a nice late-morning breakfast… then back in the car for a series of errands.

We dropped off more stuff at the storage unit, then swung by Home Depot for some additional supplies. Then back home.

Since we were expecting rain later in the day (and it had been almost 3 weeks since I broke out the lawnmower)… I spent the next hour mowing the lawn while Liz worked in the basement, laying out measurements on a piece of drywall.

Small aside: someone (I won’t name names) got into a little huff, because he wanted to set up the working space differently. This unnamed person’s approach ultimately would have been less efficient, and taken up more time… and going with Liz’s setup was better in the end.

But it took this unnamed grumpy person about 25 minutes to realize this. After that, things got better.


We didn’t have any special tools to work with drywall, so we ended up mostly using the multitool. For some of the larger cuts, I used a circular saw (though that kicked up a crapton of debris).


Notches for the joists, and a hole for the electrical outlet.

This first board was pretty tight, and needed several “shaves” to get it to fit properly. We learned to add a little more to our measurements, and the subsequent pieces went in a lot easier.


The dusty basement.


Liz, scoring the drywall.


The final piece along the back basement wall included a little notch.


You can’t hear it in this photo, but Liz was shouting “HUZZAH!”


A close-up of the final piece.


Drywall, up and installed! While we did get some guidance over the phone from Bob, it felt nice that we were able to tackle this ourselves and get things set up in place.

There are two larger pieces in the middle and on the right. And three smaller pieces in a column, on the far left. The drywall layout ended up following pretty closely to the plywood layout.

More than that – we had some struggles with the top left piece, as I think the joist is a little warped there. We had to dry fit it several times, which made me feel a little better about how long I took yesterday, with that last piece.


On the wall by the door, a pretty easy rectangular piece. ANd two smaller strips along the door.

It was interesting screwing in the drywall, as it would sometimes pop out once the srew started to go in. The screw would eventually pull the drywal into the plywood, but you have to be careful about not leting the screw get away from you.

The drywall pulls right, but the screw wants to just keep burrowing in and through the drywall – and won’t stop once the head sinks past the surface. I was slowly developing a bit of a feel, getting a sense of how much to screw in so the drywall would pull tight… but stopping short of letting the screw dig a quarter inch into the drywall itself.

Looking forward to having Bob review our work, and to hear about some tips.

Related:
Last Plywood and Visqueen in the Back Basement
Basement Supply Run

This Post Has 1 Comment

  1. Not having worked with drywall before, Liz and I both found it very easy to contend with. The multitool really makes things quite easy, and we felt comfortable with things soon after our first board.

    At the end of the day, as we were resting and recuperating (eating lunch at 5PM), we both felt that we had learned a lot over the last two days. With our experience with Visqueen and now drywall, we feel we can really knock out the remainder of our basement in short order.

    avoision Reply


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