drywall

We got a new bid from a good contractor for $800 less than the first one.  Given that they could also start within a few days instead of close to a month, the choice was easy.  Because our other bids didn’t pan out (one guy never got back to us and the other bowed out because he worked by himself), we decided to just move forward instead of wasting more time.  It looks as though they’ll start the hanging within a day or two!

This weekend I cleared out all the tools and remaining materials so that they’d have space to work.  I also went ahead and cut a hole in our patio cover and added plywood to make a standing/walking surface.  My initial plan of gracefully removing the panel in order to be able to reinstall it did not pan out.  The nails wouldn’t budge, so plan B was to rip it to shreds.  They’ll have to start with the “fun” job of lifting bunches of sheets through the slot and feeding them into the back bedroom through the window hole.  And that’s after carrying them up our front stairs and all the way to the back of the house. An elevated lot is a major pain.

We knew that our drywall job would be expensive, but it was sobering to get our first bid yesterday.  It came out at just over $5500!  While the actual floor area is only about 700 sq. ft., we have an incredible number of angles and nooks and crannies that will make for a really tricky job.  Even worse, there is no way to carry full sheets up through our tight staircase, so they are going to have carry all 80 sheets of drywall up our stairs, around to the back of the house (75′ horizontally, 12′ vertically) and then hoist them one-by-one up to our patio cover (which I have to reinforce with plywood), carry them to the back window and feed them into the house.  There is absolutely no way to get a power lift into our lot.

Hopefully some of the other bids come back lower, but we are starting to face the reality that it’s going to cost us a bundle to have someone else do the work.  Of course, we’re out of options, since doing it myself would take approximately… eternity, judging from past experience.  Given that our goal is to wrap up in June before the baby comes, that’s not a good option.  It’s starting to sound much better to tap into the equity line and maybe, just maybe, enjoy those weekends and vacation time instead…

This was one of the very few items that we hired out.  Pretty much everyone agrees that it’s one of the best not to do yourself.  We have had enough experience with drywalling in the past to know that it’s very time-consuming, and it’s much easier to have someone else wrap it up in less than a week, while you’re at work.  It would have taken many, many weekends to do the job, and we were getting desperate to get into the house and stop paying rent on top of our mortgage.