Dry Wall Finishing & Paint

A lot has happened, and I want to update, but I also want a placeholder for pics and tips that will likely come to mind.

So, this is it.

Aldrine finished hanging all the dry wall in pretty short order. There were few problems, save for a missed closet light ("Funny bulge in there Aldrine..." "Huh? Oops!) and an under-counter light wire that got drywalled over a stud creating a funny high spot. Aldrine just thought we were REALLY bad framers.

While he ought to know (he made our framing looks REALLY good), we aren't THAT bad. The repair was seamless and invisible.

The end result was beautiful.

There are three tips that I want to pass on:

1) Pay attention to your furring lumber. Just discard racked boards. Later in the process you'll know to do this, but we screwed up our finish because of some boards we put up early and didn't catch until after drywall was up and finished. Most folks won't notice but some will. So, when the lumber comes in, look at every 1X4 down its length. If it twists or is warped badly, pull it. You can cut it into short blocks where the twist or warp won't matter.

2) If your ceiling joists are really uneven, run 1x3's at 90' at 16" intervals all the way across them. We screwed them but you can nail them. You can then adjust them by getting your head up very high s you can look down each run and lower the boards in places where the joists are higher. This creates a nice reasonably level, wide nailing area for your dry wallers. Your ceilings will look MUCH better. We're told that a rolling scaffold works very well, but we managed with just 2 6' ladders.

3) Aldrine insisted upon 5/8" board for the ceilings. He just said, "It's better". I agree. As much work as we did smoothing out the ceiling joists with 1x3's, they weren't perfect. 5/8" hides the imperfections and lays much more smoothly. It looks great.

3.5) Aldrine insisted upon "Straight Flex" to deal with the funky angles up in the attic. If you're a DIYer, try that stuff. He also wanted Durabond 20 for some of the finishing, which he's great with, but he's fast and professional. It does NOT leave you with much time to get it up. They have a slower drying compound that's better for amateurs.

Hopefully, we have some close ups to show.

Once done with Dry Wall, we ran on to paint.

Normally, one primes dry wall, then paints. We were told that if we're in a huge hurry to get in, just spray it with 2 coats of primer (it would pass inspection) and worry about paint later. All well and good.

So we went to ICI and asked about primer. We were told that there's primer and there's primer and then there's paint and better paint. We were told that if we're doing two coats of primer, it'll be OK, but it won't look great and we'll have to paint anyway. Two coats of self-priming good quality paint and we're DONE for not much more.

Both of us hate "half a$$ed" solutions, so we picked a nice neutral high quality latex that we could get lots of 5 gallon buckets of and took that tack. The trick here is we used a standard color. Why? We wanted to buy what we thought we needed and a bit more. If we had 5 gallons left, we could return it--not a custom color.

Next up, get a paint sprayer. We thought about buying one. You can get them fairly cheaply. Alas, they are fairly cheap in outcome. You can also rent a good one. For something like $79 a day, you can rent a serious paint sprayer. Folks, in 9 man hours you can easily paint 2000 square feet with two coats. DONE. Including clean up. How long does it take you to roll out a room?

Painting tips:

Take your time and mask everything off before you get the sprayer. It takes time. Paint before flooring goes in unless you want to have drop cloths.

Make sure you get your walls clean--damp mop off the dust that doesn't vacuum or blow off. It has be recommended that one open up one end of the house and then get a leaf blower and a mask and just blow all the dust out. I have no experience with that, but it sounds fun and ought to work. We used a compressor with a blower fitting. If your compressor is large enough, it should work well. If not (our wasn't) definitely follow up with a damp mop.

Cover up. Wear goggles. I was wiping latex OUT of my eyes by the end. Gross. A mask is a very good idea. Preferably a P-100 respirator.

This is a two man job. Get a helper and make sure that they have a roller. There will be drips unless you are very good. Someone needs to get them immediately and roll them out. Also, the sprayer is heavy, as are the 5 gallon buckets of paint. You don't want to hurt your back changing out your paint. A helper, um, helps.

If you have time, get your trim in first (we didn't). That way, the paint seals it in and saves you a lot of detail work later.

REMOVE (don't just mask or use the "shower caps" that come with) your smoke detectors. Modern smoke detectors are VERY sensitive and they are also all connected so that if one goes off, they ALL go off. Killing the fuse doesn't do anything either. There is nothing like being half way through a paint job at 8:00 at night and suddenly having the din of 7 alarms going off. Why? Because the FUMES set one of the alarms off.

We put a fan on the offending smoke detector, and after a couple minutes, it stopped. We set the fan down and it went off again. Fine. We turned the fan up, and set it on a paint bucket. All quiet. The next morning (with the windows open all night) we turned off the fan and WEEET, WEEET, WEEET!. Take it from me. REMOVE the smoke detectors until all paint vapors have cleared the house.

The outcome on painting with a sprayer is very nice, and very uniform. What paint you do get on you actually washes off more easily, though it gets into every nook and cranny. I figure that the paint sprayer saved about 30 man hours, if not more and could have saved more than that had we had time to get everything in place.

More coming soon and we'll also come back and add some pics shortly.

Dry Wall Going Up

So, after the gauntlet, Aldrine was able to get to work hanging gypsum board. Mostly at night (LATE into the night) and mostly alone. Remember, the walls mostly got the 54" wide 12' sheets. Ceilings got 5/8" too.







You gotta admit, though, it's looking pretty good. He has to be the hardest working man I know. He's good, too.







Next up, taping and finishing, then paint!

Dry Wall Prepping

So, we're under the gun time wise and we've scheduled the drywaller, Aldrine. The problem is, just like with the Spray Foam Guys (Priority 1), we aren't fully ready for him and we need to get that way fast.

So, it's the Gauntlet again for us.

We had to get the last of the nailing surfaces in place for dry wall and we also needed to level the ceilings with 1x3 furring. This works pretty well, by the way. We used 1 5/8" and 2" screws and keyed off the lowest ceiling joist. We also had to reposition a number of can lights to account for the 5/8" drywall that our Aldrine wanted to use. We have a LOT of can lights.







Another problem was the spray foam. The guys were pretty good, and we did more than one walk through with them, but they still left high spots of foam on the wall... spots that needed to be shaved off. But you can't do it with a utility knife. The foam is tough. You need to use a saw or in some cases you can chisel it out. I like a wood chisel in tight spots and a pull saw on the flat big areas. It was a pain.


We also had a brain killer of a problem trying to figure out how to create nailing surfaces for the attic door way, where the shed roof meets the gable and where it's so low that we need every single inch. In fact, we've only got about 3" of spray foam at one corner between drywall and roof decking. It's only a tiny spot, but we needed the head room.



It's hard to see, but there are several different planes and angles here that I had to find a way to marry and merge while leaving adequate nailing space. Then I prayed that Aldrine could work his magic.



Finally, we had to put the concealment shoes back, along with our own addition, before the walls were closed up. I'm glad we took the time. Maybe it's creepy, but honoring a tradition seems right. And it'll provide another story for someone else in 100 years, I suspect. We did provide a link to this blog inside one of our shoes and wrote it on the sole of another. Maybe it'll be archived in some historic web archive. Who knows?
























Here's a link to our prior discussion of concealment shoes, for those who are curious.


Wait until you see the drywall.

Next posting.

Between the Gauntlets

As we've reached each benchmark, we've had to run a hurried gauntlet of tasks to get ready for the contractors. The spray foam guys needed to have all the furring up on the exterior walls and any fire breaks in place. Because we are "part timers" we often would stop partway through a room and then start up again the next day or even several days later. As such, there were all kinds of missed or forgotten spots that needed 2x4's cut and tap-conned into place. Frankly, taking care of that nearly killed us, but we made it and foam got sprayed, as you've seen.

Then came the prep for the arrival dry wall. We still had some flooring issues that needed to be dealt with from the spray foam. We didn't screw down OSB in the living room so those guys could pull it up and spray the sill underneath. But we wanted our OSB down before the drywall went up and that means that we had to have it in before the drywall came. More rushing around with that, but it was more like a rest between gauntlets.

Then, the drywall came. On a BIG truck. I had to rush out (more rushing, of course) with a tall ladder and a saw to make room for the boom to get under a tree in the ally. Fortunately somebody took a blow torch to a metal post that was up back there a couple weeks ago.








It was a lot of gypsum board. 211 sheets, if memory serves. That's a lot of board, when you consider that much of it was 12' long and 54" wide.




Can you guess how many guys it takes to move that much drywall and distribute it on three floors in 5 rooms?




Let me give you a hint. The operator in this picture was inside the house.




































The answer is 2. Two guys. Just two guys.

My job was to keep them from breaking the board or themselves. Now, it was also my responsibility to make sure that I got what I ordered and to make sure that it got placed where it was needed. You DON'T want to have your drywallers moving sheetrock all over the place. Somehow, these two guys got the big wall boards where they needed to be and then stacked the 5/8" boards on top (ceilings go up first).

Then, and I don't know how I did this, but I glanced at the last two piles and saw that I didn't get enough of the 5/8" board. Like 20 sheets shy. It's scary how quickly you can learn to not only differentiate between similar building materials but also develop an eye for quantities. I quickly called the guys over and called the salesman who made sure we got the right material for the order the next day. This is good. It would have been a real hassle to force the drywallers to stop and wit for more ceiling board.

Next up, prepping for the drywallers and seeing them hang.

Why you use 2' increments for furring.

One word: DRYWALL.

When furring in the windows, we almost made the huge mistake of mis-attaching the furring strips.

For the sake of example, let's say we started in the right hand corner of a room and were laying furring along the wall to the left. Since we'd never done this before, we started with the assumption that when you started from the corner with the first furring strip, you'd measure from the exposed edge (the left side of the 2x4 ) of the corner 2x4, measure over 24" to the left, then lay the second furring strip to the right side of that 24" mark. So far so good.

The question was what happens when you come to a window, or a door frame. What then? I thought, well, you just frame in the window on all four sides, then continue measuring 24" to the left of the left side of the window and start measuring 24" from there. WRONG.

Apparently, you need to keep the 24" pacing around the wall and room, regardless of what gets in the way, because of the drywall 4'x8'measurements. So, if you need to add more strips around a window or a door frame that is not at a pre-measured interval, you just add in new furring where you need it.

In the animated image here, I've shown what we did, and why. CLICK THE IMAGE.

Note (in the animation) the orange arrows show where we added in the additional furring to the left, above and below the window to accommodate the window, but did NOT adjust the 2' spacing of the regular furring strips, and how the drywall would be laid in (from the ceiling downwards) after everything was in place.

Again, I note: In the 'preview' image, it doesn't show the animation, so you'll need to click on the image to see the full presentation.