First Attempt with Soundproof Drywall

January 13, 2022

Big night for us. After doing a lot of prep work in the upstairs hallway, tonight Liz and I planned to tackle installing a big sheet of soundproof drywall.

The thing of this is: I’d only ever tried installing this with Bob. The drywall is thick (5/8″), comprised of two pieces glued together. And the kicker? The thing is heavy. Like heav-y.

Back when I was helping Bob install this in the master bedroom, I struggled a lot just moving boards around. And had trouble lifting up the boards onto horses.

These boards are 10′ long, and logistically… we needed to cut them down a bit. So the plan/assumption was that with less material, Liz and I could navigate these boards easier… and lift them into place.

Getting ready for some dust. Been a little while, since our last selfie.

Liz measured out the cuts, and I ended up free-handing things with a circular saw against a board leaning up against a wall. Liz had the shop vac going, in an attempt to pick up any drywall dust that we kicked up.

Overall – it worked pretty well! Better than I thought, actually. On our task list for tonight, I was expecting us to argue and fight a lot… but things went fairly smoothly with all the drywall work.

It was a challenge relocating this heavy board into the hallway, and then positioning it in place. We had to dry fit it a few times, and did some fine-tuning with the outlet hole.

An extra challenge: we had to lift up the drywall high enough to clear the outlet, then set it down on top of the baseboard. All the while, trying to prevent it from toppling over.

I’m incredibly proud that we were able to get this piece installed, and set up. The drywall really is super heavy, and I’ve been unsure how we would even work with the material (short of hiring rockers to do it for us). So I’m delighted that we have a system now, where Liz and I can work with this stuff. And get more pieces installed.

Ultimately, this means we’re going to be cutting the drywall down to smaller, more manageable lengths. But the realization we had was that the soundproof drywall is going to get covered with another layer of 3/8″ drywall. So we can be fairly loose in our installs, and it won’t really show.

We did a lot of fine-tuning with the multitool. And I think our prior work with drywall got us to a comfortable enough place where we’re ok fixing things on the fly (our past selves would probably be sweating all the cuts a lot more than our present selves).

As an added bonus, we had a Society bottle arrive today. So this made for a nice celebration, at the end of the night.

I can’t say it enough – tonight was a big milestone for us. The fact that we got a good system in place to work with this heavy drywall was huge. And it opens up a lot more work that Liz and I can tackle, ourselves.

We’ve got a lot of sheets of this stuff on the second floor, just hanging out. Looking forward to using these boards, and also looking forward to making more room. In every sense of that phrase.