Drywall - Why you should hire a professional
Or, why we should have hired a professional to begin with!
In our previous house, we did a lot of drywalling ourselves, and gradually learned basically how to do it, though I'd say much of our good results were due to extremely detailed and miserable sanding. My husband got to be fairly proficient at putting down the mud on the seams though.
If you've never drywalled, basically it starts with screwing sheets of drywall (a.k.a Sheetrock or gypsum board) to the studs of your room. This step also involves carefully cutting out holes for the power receptacles, light fixture electrical boxes and junction boxes, and openings for doors and windows. Typical tools for cutting include a Stanley knife or similar, and a drywall saw and keyhole saw. Big pieces of drywall can be trimmed to size by scoring the board with the utility knife using a straight-edge (or free-handing it carefully), then snapping the board along the scored edge and cutting the paper backing with the utility knife.
Once you've hung your drywall up (carefully butting the seams together, etc... visit askthebuilder.com and search for drywall, he's got all the details there), then you start taping the seams, using joint compound (or "mud") to cover the joints, then applying additional coats of mud to smooth out the seams to give the walls a smooth appearance.
And for non-pro's there's usually a good deal of sanding between coats of joint compound.
Here's what happened to us in our current remodeling project.
Once the steel I-beam had taken the place of our load-bearing wall, our carpenters fitted the beam with some 1" wood to allow drywall to be attached to it. We had them put some windows into the room, and then started hanging some drywall sheets. We ended up hiring the carpenters to help hang the ceiling (for which we also rented a drywall lift to push the sheets up to the ceiling and make installation easier), as well as to stud out a soffit and around the exposed jack holding up the I-beam.
Total cost for the two guys to help my husband and father finish hanging the drywall = $1500.
Rental of the lift = $45
Plus the sheets of drywall ($7 an 8' sheet or so).
And the fancy self-loading screwdriver my husband bought for shooting screws into the sheets quickly ($180).
We had decided long ago to hire someone to mud after we had the sheets up. Dealing with joint compound is not one of our favorite activities. I contacted all my friends in the area for a recommendation for a dry-waller. Not many suggestions surfaced. I picked a random contractor from the phone book and he agreed to take a look at it. He was willing to do it, but it would be a week before he could start. We are trying to keep things moving along here (baby coming), and with no one else getting back to us in that day or two, we made a hasty and foolish decision... to go ahead and mud the walls ourselves.
However, I can't be of much help, especially when it comes to bending low or getting up on ladders. So this would mean my husband had a lot of work to do by himself. We decided to call in my sister and brother-in-law to help with the first coat of mud. They graciously agreed to give up their Saturday and help us.
From then on it was a disaster. While they were very helpful in getting all the screws set into the walls, when it came to mixing the mud we had problems. We were planning to use a quick-setting mud, something we had (successfully) used in our old house when we refinished the basement, so we would be able to do at least two coats that day. My sister was left to mix the mud, but she just couldn't seem to get the proportions of water and mix right. It took her half an hour and two bags of mix to get something usable, and this is a mix with a 60-90 minute workable time limit. In other words, we lost half the time we had to work with the joint compound because of how long it took to mix it.
This caused us to frantically start applying the mud to the walls... yes, even me, who had not intended to help with this part at all. I should have not helped... I couldn't remember how to apply it right, in fact I don't think i had done much of this before. I was usually on the sanding crew. My sister and her husband didn't know how to do it at all. I thought they did, so wasn't paying much attention... Even when the mud started setting up, my sister kept applying it, so it turned out like chunks of concrete slapped onto the wall in random jagged patterns. Needless to say, it was impossible to sand, and we knew we would not be asking for any more help for the rest of the project, at least not free help.
We spent all day Sunday attempting to salvage the walls, sanding and sanding. In the meantime the contractor who wasn't able to come for a week called with his quote. $850 to mud the room. I asked how much it would have been if we had had him hang the sheets. $250. Much less than we paid our carpenters to help us with it. We would have saved at least $500 if we had just hired the pros to begin with.
This was a lesson in poor planning on the general contractor's part... namely me. We should have been calling for dry-wallers a week before we wanted them to come in. Now, on Sunday afternoon we started calling other dry-wallers in the yellow pages in hopes that someone could rescue our walls and finish the job for us.
Monday afternoon one of the professionals we had called, who also happened to be one of the only names I had a recommendation for because he did work at our church, showed up at our door. I warily ushered him into our future living room. I told him how we had felt time pressure that made us start the job ourselves. "It's going to take longer to do now than if you had just had us do it to begin with," he informed me. He took careful stock of the situation, looked at the areas where new drywall met old and figured out a way he could make the texture more consistent in those spots, and told me it would be $800-$1000 to do the job. He could start Tuesday afternoon.
I hired him.
So today, Tuesday, I came home from getting lunch with the kids to find the dry-wallers here and unloading their supplies and equipment into my house. The boss had me sign his bid sheet, and informed me that the result would not be perfect, because of how much mud was on the walls in the wrong spots from what we did. I said I understood.
Now one of his crew members is in the living room. He started by attacking our walls with a putty knife, scraping off our mis-applied joint compound. He is walking around on drywall stilts (most impressive), and I think he's started applying actual mud to the walls. I think he's re-taping some sections too. I am not looking over his shoulder--my main goal is to keep the kids and dog out of his way--but I have a feeling it will look a lot better by the time he leaves than it did before he came. They plan to finish in 3-4 days.
We got ourselves into a situation where we had to swallow our pride and admit we could not fix our own mistake... but now that's over with I'm looking forward to the finished living room, and having more square footage to spread out into. We have been crammed into what will be our dining room, with our microwave and TV overlapping each other, a couch shoved up against the side of our dining table, no power in the room, an extension cord running one workstation in our former office, soon to be our kitchen. Most importantly, finishing that side of the house means we can start preparing our kitchen and dining room for the installation of our new cabinets. The end is starting to come into sight!
This time, we'll be hiring someone to drywall the other half of the house... starting with hanging the sheets!
