Office Space- Drywall
Posted by Wayne
Measuring, cutting, and attaching the drywall onto the framing was pretty easy and seeing what the walls looked like after all of the work made it a fun job to do. It stopped being quite so fun once it came time to finish the seams. I don’t find that part particularly tough anymore, but it is monotonous work and you have to be a perfectionist if you want the walls to end up seamless.
Hanging drywall is really a two person job so I asked my brother to help out. This required a minimum of tools: a drywalling square, a utility knife, and a drill with a drywall bit, and a drywall rasp. The drywall bit allows you to drive every drywall screw to the perfect depth. You certainly don’t want to go too shallow with the screws because you wouldn’t get a smooth surface, and it you went too deep they’d be more difficult to fill in and/or weaken the drywall.
Hanging the drywall is a pretty straightforward process, but there are a couple of things to consider. The first thing is that hanging the drywall takes a small amount of planning as to the orientation of each piece to maximize the amount of tapered edge joints. Sheets of drywall come with 2 tapered edges, and finishing a seam where two tapered edges meet is a breeze because that creates a ready made indention to fill in with joint compound and doesn’t require any feathering.
Unfortunately you’re almost assured to get a few “butt joints” as well, where the ends of two drywall sheets meet or you get two pieces of cut drywall meeting. These require a good deal of feathering to get it where you can’t see the joint. Although you can get both types of joints looking great, I planned on having all of the butt joints in less visible areas of the room.
See the image below for examples of tapered and butt joints. The butt joint is a little exaggerated so you can see the difference between the two joints, the “bubble” of joint compound is actually a lot wider and feathered in so that it’s hardly noticeable.
The second thing to consider is that while most of your drywall cuts don’t have to be perfect down to a hair’s width, when you’re cutting a hole for a light, switch, or outlet, they have to be pretty darned close. When you’re holding a big and unwieldy sheet of drywall above you head, you want to know that the hole you cut for the recessed lighting is cut in the right place. Even being off by a half an inch might screw up your sheet of drywall, so I made sure that I measured very carefully when cutting these holes.
Once you have your measurements, cutting the drywall to size is a simple matter of marking a straight line onto the drywall with the help of your drywall square, cutting along the same line with the utility knife, and then the drywall easily breaks at the line with a little bit of pressure. Then you can run the utility knife along the back of the drywall to finish off the cut.
We started with the ceiling and once that was finished we did the walls from the floor up. The lowest sheets we started about an inch off the ground by resting them on 1×2 blocks. That gap would be covered by trim along the floor. I’m not sure this is typical of drywall installation but as this office space is in the basement my brother suggested that if there should ever be a small flood at least the drywall wouldn’t soak it up and be ruined. Made sense to me.
Most of the time we got our measurements right on the first try, but just in case we had the drywall rasp handy to quickly make small adjustments to to the size of the sheets. It’s kind of like a big cheese grater.
The last piece of drywall that was hung was the 1/8th inch thick drywall which I contact cemented to the bottom of the I-beam. That stuck on very well and you’d never guess that it wasn’t standard thickness drywall applied the old fashioned way.
Once the drywall was all hung my brother headed for the hills while I got ready for the long task of finishing the corners and seams. My first step was apply a corner bead to the two outward facing corners of the room. The corner bead is basically a long strip of shaped metal covered with drywall paper tape. These are stuck to the unfinished corner with a bit of joint compound and then feathered in a little bit with later coats.
After the corner beads were cut to length and stuck in place, I taped all of the seams in the room with drywall tape which is basically like a sticky plastic mesh. I pushed the tape into all of the corners with a putty knife.
Once the seams were all taped, I began applying premixed joint compound to all of the seams and corners, and also over all of the screw holes from hanging the drywall. For all of the tapered joints this required about three separate applications of the joint compound and for the butt joints it required 4 applications, each with a wider taping knife which helped feather in the joint. I also had to sand all the seams smooth after each coat.
The joints where the two tapered edges met were very easy to finish and when they were sanded the right amount I could see a straight line where the tapering begins to appear. That let me know that I had a perfectly flat transition between the two pieces and therefore an invisible seam.
For the butt joins I made use of a tripod light and positioned it so it was always shining across the seam I was working on. This basically showed me the worst case scenario as far as how light would hit the seam and I could easily see when a seam had enough feathering and sanding.
I am proud to say that the drywalling I did in the office space is unmatched in our house. I can see hints of seams on a lot of walls in our house, but the seams in the office space are invisible. It’s tough to get good pictures of the walls but here are a few shots. Any ripples you see are an illusion created by the camera to discredit my work.
6 Responses to “Office Space- Drywall”
Leave a Reply
January 20th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Great diagrams, how about some pictures? How else will we be able to appreciate your drywall seams?
Any amateur that can get good as in unnoticeable seams,especially the butt joints, gets my admiration.
January 20th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
I also had no idea they made an actual drywall bit. I usually just rely on feel with clutch as a failsafe.
Is it difficult to start the screws with that thingamabob?
January 21st, 2008 at 9:43 am
Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures while I was doing the work, so the pics will be coming soon when I unveil the final product in pictures. Then you will appreciate my mastery of the skill.
The drywall bit is actually a concave “cup” surrounding the bit, so it’s just as easy to start a screw as any other bit. It allows the screw to go about an 1/8th of an inch below the surface before pulling the bit out of the screw head.
January 21st, 2008 at 9:51 am
On second thought, good idea. I will add a pic of a finished tapered, butt, and corner to this post.
January 25th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
I’ve been hanging and finishing drywall for 32 years and it’s neat to read when someone does it themselves and it turns out good. My only advice is make sure that your mud is mixed up good, it works easier that way. I never use the mesh tape in the corners, paper tape just gives a crisper line for me. glad your job turned out good.
January 26th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Thanks for the advice Bill! I read that all the pros swear by the paper tape but it seems like the mesh tape is a lot harder for a rookie to screw up and I can’t complain about the results.