ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

Oh drywall, that most underappreciated of the construction arts.  It’s messy and finicky, but it’s got a (relatively) short learning curve.  HOWEVER, there is a huge gap between the skills of a drywall master and that of a novice.  Putting up drywall has left a mark on everyone who has done it, and everybody likes to share their hard-won knowledge.

Restoring a house in the year 2009 is a fascinating process.  Twitter (find me @extremecraft), which had always been a fun, nonessential communication tool, became my construction oracle when it came time to put up some drywall.  I’d put up a tweet about the part of the process that I was starting, and a flood of advice on dust masks, application tools and zen drywall technique would come pouring in.

Our wallpaper saga is well-known to readers of this blog.  When we started tearing down the wallpaper in the house, we found out why there was so damn much of it.  There was nothing underneath the drywall but redwood planks.  Victorian houses in our area were frequently constructed with big ol’ redwood beams that were then finished (inside and out) by the application of thick redwood planks.  The photo at the beginning of this post was taken from our wallpaper peeling party, and you can see the beautiful, exposed old-growth redwood in our dining room.  Every person we showed the wall to cooed about how beautiful the wood was, and told us that we should keep it the way it is.

That would be great…except that we don’t want to live in a cabin.  We’re considering leaving some “rustic” touches in our guest bedroom…but we’ll tell you more about that later.

Back to the drywall.  Both Claire and I have done our share of drywall sanding, but we’ve never masterminded a drywall project from start to finish.  We were starting with one huge advantage, though, which was the fact that we would be putting the sheet rock over a plank wall instead of a normal frame wall.  That meant the wall would be fairly forgiving, and that we could piece the drywall into any weird spots and use drywall mud to finish and smooth things out.

Rather than tackle everything by ourselves, we decided to reach into our (rapidly shrinking) piggy bank and pull out a bit of money to hire a handyman to help us with the dining room.  We found an experienced handyman with affordable rates from a Craigslist ad.  He touted his attention to detail and years of experience, so we invited him over to take a look.  He seemed confident that we could knock out the project in the course of a couple of evenings.

When we hopped in the handyman’s pickup truck to get the drywall and supplies, it became apparent that he had overstated his drywall experience.  I think he’d worked on plenty of drywall projects, but hadn’t really engineered any from start to finish.  Still, he was nice, had more experience than us, and would be a big help on this relatively small project.

I took down the 100-year old wooden molding.  This stuff is a work of art, so I was really careful not to splinter or break it.  As I started to scratch some of the white paint off, I saw that it had originally been painted a beautiful terra-cotta color with very subtle buffed gold accents.  Still, we had already planned the room’s color scheme, so we decided to leave the trim white.  We’ll be revealing more about our plans for the room VERY soon.

As anybody who’s done it knows, drywall is a huge mess.  Wear a mask.  The dust will get into places that will leave you scratching your (drywall dust-flecked) head.  As advertised, the drywall went up very quickly.  Our handyman was a little less deft with his application of the drywall mud.  I watched him apply a SUPER THICK layer of mud to the corners before he applied the drywall tape.  It only makes sense that you want a corner to be square, rather than a weird angle.  When I explained this to him, he seemed to get it and scraped some of the mud from the corners.  He was better at applying the mud to the seams and feathering the edges, but applying the mud still took more than double the time that putting the drywall up took.  The corners still wound up looking a little clumsy and thick.

Here is our hard-won drywall advice.  This is going to sound very un-D.I.Y. of me, but If you’re a novice and can afford it, HIRE A DRYWALL PRO!  If we had been less stingy, we would have paid less money to a professional, because they can do it in much less time, and with much better results.  We feel like we learned a lot from the process, and we feel like we could fumble our way through some more basic drywall projects with pretty good results, but we’re at least going to hire a professional to do the finishing work with the drywall mud for us when we do our kitchen.  We also need somebody to skim-coat the damaged places on our walls where we got overzealous with our wallpaper removal.

I’m looking forward to watching a pro fix up the corners and feather the seams with craftsmanship and precision.  I’ll be taking notes (and kicking myself for not hiring somebody sooner).

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.