Drywall Work in the Basement

We’re in an interesting phase with the house work. While we have a lot of critical work underway, Liz and I have been focusing our joint time trying to reduce the amount of material that’s built up. This means us focusing our efforts on using up the existing plywood and drywall boards we have, at all levels of the house.

Interestingly, this also means that we’re not necessarily finishing any specific projects or areas (just yet). As we’re trying to prioritize cleanup/use of material first, before we do more.

While we made a big dent in a lot of the soundproof drywall we had upstairs, this weekend we shifted back down to the basement, as we have a lot of drywall that just needs to get affixed to the walls.

After last weekend’s basement shuffle, we’ve got several sections that are ready for drywall. First up: relocating an outlet.

This is a relatively minor thing, but I really haven’t done much electrical at all, and I find it incredibly daunting. We flipped the circuit off, and I (slowly) relocated this outlet away from the wall.

It’s a temporary home, but this was a first for me (working with functional outlets/electricity).

With the wall clear, there were a few more things we had to do before adding drywall. First up: installing some wood header pieces, inside the joist spaces, so that the drywall had something to grab onto. And we also wanted to add some soundproof insulation to the walls (a future plan for this space down here is to convert it into a bathroom).

While I got a good amount of the drywall in, I had to step away in the late afternoon to help Bob with some other work. Liz did a great job finishing up the last pieces of insulation. But as you can tell from this photo, she really, really dislike working with insulation.

We didn’t get all that far today, but were able to get one piece of drywall up.

Worth noting: Liz and I were talking afterwards, and realized that a year or so ago… fitting just this one piece would have taken the full day, and multiple dry-fitting attempts.

While this was a somewhat complex cut, we got it positioned, adjusted, and affixed in a fairly short amount of time. It’s sometimes hard to see, but we’re definitely better/faster than we used to be.

Related:
Basement Shuffle
First Attempt with Soundproof Drywall