drywall

Although these pictures are actually “in progress” pictures, they give a pretty good idea of what the drywall looks like now. We ended up getting a bid from a contractor we’ve used before for $800 vs. the ridiculous $2200 that the guy who did our upstairs wanted to charge us. $2200 to do one room and a hallway ceiling?? As you may remember from the last post on this room, we decided to cop out and have someone drywall over the heavily-cracked plaster in this room. We got a bid by a plasterer, who said it all had to come down and be replaced (for $3200!), so that was out of the question. And since we are really trying to accelerate progress on our house, we decided to spend the $800 and just get it done. If I were doing this myself, it’d take me longer to just acquire the drywall then it took these guys to get the whole project done. It’s such a great and unfamiliar feeling to see progress on a project when I come home from work! I really like how they installed the drywall. They got 4’6″ x 12′ sheets, so there is only a single horizontal seem on each wall, making for really smooth walls.

We don’t have good “before” pictures of these areas, but the hallway ceiling, in particular, was in horrible shape. There had been some exposed pipes run to the upstairs sink, and the corner where they had penetrated the ceiling was a big, gaping hole. A long-ago leak had turned much of the lathe and plaster black, and most of the ceiling was cracked. Going over the whole thing with a smooth sheet of drywall has made such a difference…

Drywalled family room

Hallway ceiling remade

As anyone who has ever remodeled a house knows, sometimes “easy” just means easier than the alternative. Easy also may mean that you are cutting corners or hiring someone else to do the work. In this case, we’re doing both!

We have long questioned how far we wanted to go on this back bedroom, which was formerly Chloe’s room and is now destined to become our family room. The plaster is cracked in quite a few places, although to some extent that’s been mitigated by the multiple layers of wallpaper. On our ambitious days, we’ve talked about stripping off the wallpaper and repairing the plaster. In our more lazy moments, we’ve contemplated doing nothing and just moving a couch our TV into the room. But, as we’ve gotten really tired of shuffling things around our house as projects move from one area to the next, we did commit to not “temporarily” start using this room, a phrase that for us usually equates to at least two years before we fix it up.

Our compromise in this case was to remove all the trim, so that we can have someone (not us!) come in and install 1/4″ drywall over all the walls. While the plaster purists out there will be appalled, we just don’t have the time or patience right now to strip off all the wallpaper and fix up the plaster. I spent about 3 hours removing all the trim today as the first phase of this project, and tomorrow I’m going to call to get a quote on the drywall work. The salvageable trim will go to Houck’s for stripping, and we will install new base trim. One of the previous renters had a dog that did an amazing amount of damage to the base trim, so it was shot. We will probably take the picture rail to the Rebuilding Center, because I’d rather go with crown, and there is no other picture rail in the entire house. Anyway, once get the walls “restored,” we’ll refinish our stripped trim and replace the trim that wasn’t salvageable. And between getting a quote and actually getting the drywall up, I am going to rough in some wiring for the TV. Our goal is to have this room finished by the time Stephanie starts teaching again in late September.

And just now Stephanie asked me while cutting some vegetables in the kitchen whether “the final nail was in the coffin?” on the patio door idea. That was something we had tossed around for awhile…”wouldn’t it be nice if we replaced the back window with a door out the the patio?” This idea has long been stretched between our desire to streamline our projects and our bad habit of coming up with bright ideas. Keep posted to see which philosophy wins…

Wow, this looks different… even though the rooms will be full of color by the time we’re through, the stark white walls of drywall primer are an exciting milestone. The formerly dull, dark rooms are full of light, even with just a camera flash. The drywall is looking really good – we’ve only been able to find a few problem spots, all of which can be easily corrected. The funny thing is that I had nearly finished priming Chloe’s room before noticing that her recessed light was no longer there, or more correctly, was neatly covered up by the drywall. One of the hangers forgot

Click to continue »

After a partial day on Saturday and some work this morning, our drywall was officially declared finished. We are really impressed with the quality of the work, and the only imperfections that we can find are very minor. Definitely nothing big enough to complain about. We’re going to prime it next weekend and then see how it looks.

We have really been happy with our drywall contractor, Rueben Cortez. Click to continue »

One of the guys showed up for a bit on Saturday, and there were a couple here today. There’s hardly any point in showing new pictures, but at least they’re more interesting (maybe) than reading “it looks about the same as it did a couple of days ago.” At the very least, it makes us feel like more progress is being made. The funny thing about that is that tomorrow will only be the two week mark from when the project started. Yes, it could have gone faster if they were dedicated to it every day, but so what?? I just have to think of where we’d be without the drywallers. Hmmm…let me think about that for a second… Click to continue »

Today they went from the lone taper to a crew of four. As you’d imagine, things are really starting to look better. Almost every joint has tape now, and the closets now have tape and mud in them. Also, the couple of problem areas I identified have been rehung, so we’re pretty happy. A few more days of mudding and sanding should finish things up!

After being MIA for 3 days, our drywall contractor finally got his taping crew over to our house today. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, because I’m not. However, the few times that we have hired outside help, the lack of communication has been the tie that binds them all together. Even the better ones, like this guy. He does actually show up on the days that he says he will, but the time will be a total mystery. They didn’t start until Click to continue »

By last night all the drywall was hung, and all the mess was cleaned up.

Main room:

Chloe checking out her (future) baby sister’s room, and the view looking back towards the main room:

In the main room, looking through the hall towards Chloe’s room.  The new bathroom is on the right:

They didn’t quite meet their goal of hanging it all in one day, but they came really close. Being a slow drywaller myself, it’s impressive to me to see two guys accomplish so much in only a day…

The contractor had said that he “might” start on Tuesday, and thankfully, he did. We had a beautiful, sunny day in the 60′s, which is pretty rare in Portland in the spring. This was pretty much the ideal day to be hoisting drywall up through our patio cover and in through the window. It would have been a real mess if it’d been raining. Four guys brought up 85 sheets in less than two hours, which is really, really impressive. This picture is of one of the three stacks sitting up there right now. They’re going to be back at 8 AM to start hanging it!  By the way, if you haven’t been in our upstairs, the drywall should give you a good idea of how short the ceiling is and why it was so worth the effort to spend nearly a week raising the ceiling by only 3″
Chloe is really excited about her room, and she wanted to come up with me tonight to take pictures of it…