Drywall clean-up on aisle 3

On Saturday I led a team of volunteers from our church to do some drywall work on a home that was damaged during Hurricane Florence last year. The house had been completely gutted to the studs, rewired, replumbed, insulated and most of the drywall reinstalled. All but the electrical has been done by volunteers and unfortunately, it shows. I should have taken a few photos.

The drywall was hung vertically and parallel to the joists on the ceiling. What. A. Freaking. Mess. They ripped the drywall lengthwise to get it to line up with the framing, removing the tapered edge. On the ceiling, the drywall seams all met at one point making it really tough to give them a smooth finish. Our group came in to finish hanging the drywall and along with another group start taping and mudding the drywall.

To those who think hanging vertical is the way to go, framing is rarely perfect. Windows and doors don't tend to fall into a position that aligns perfectly with 48" wide sheetrock. Cutting the length of a sheet of drywall is a lot more work than a shorter cross cut, removing the tapered edge makes finishing harder. Even when your framing lines up perfectly with 16" centers, that may work on one side of an interior wall but it can't line up on the other if there is an outside corner on the wall. Judging by the pile of unusable scrap the other group created, I'd say you have a lot more waste hanging it vertically than horizontally. And they created a lot more seams, especially the ever-popular butt joints.

I will hang sheetrock vertically when a single sheet covers the area completely, like inside a closet or any section of wall 48" wide or narrower. Otherwise, you'll have fewer joints and less waste if you go horizontally.

Oh, and the plumbing! Let's just say the toilet was not installed with the big butted man (or woman) in mind. The side of the tank was tight against the wall.

Rant off...

I feel your pain. I worked for a big company and someone got the idea of taking on a project to help the poor and revitalize a poor area of town. It was going to teach these 50 recent college grad management training kids how teamwork goes. The company bought a home that was run down and needed everything for next to nothing and if it was perfectly done might be worth 60k. They sent this band of kids in after buying them every brand new tool you could desire to work on a project like this. They were led by a bunch of management guys that didn’t know one end of a hammer from the other but had watched a lot of home makeover TV. They worked on it for about 6 months and consumed a few thousand pizzas and drinks and had made even a bigger mess than than they started with. The big show they did at the beginning had the media asking when will this be done. The VP of the company got involved and said this needs to get done. They then tried to talk the maintenance crews and the apprentices into finishing it and they said sure if you pay us. They had them down there working on it for a few months and it was going slow so they finally hired some pros to come in and they tore out almost everything and started over and had the house done nothing flat. Then they do another media blitz bringing back the pizza kids saying look what they did and give this poor single mom with a bunch of kids a 60k house that someone told me had 250k in it. Fifteen years later driving past it you can’t tell it from all the other run down houses in that neighborhood.


I have hung Drywall both directions. In old construction there is no rhyme or reason I say run it whatever direction has the least amount of seams and especially butt joints. But horizontal is normally better and splitting sheets lengthwise just to get the joint over a stud is crazy.

Bud,
Yep. I did have to one wall horizontally that was under 4' wide because I was out of full sheets. I had a couple of half sheets so I was able to do it with one seam at 4'. The crew ahead of us probably create several dozen butt joints that could have been avoided had they hung it the other way.

These organizations are really doing some good work for people that wouldn't otherwise be able to get their homes repaired. We were down in Spring Lake, NC just north of Fort Bragg. Bragg is the economic engine for this area. There are a lot of poor and elderly in the area. One thing they do have is a lot of all brick ranch homes. Something that is really hard to find in our much more affluent area around Raleigh. The house we were working on is a pretty solid all brick 3 BR/2 bath ranch. Working full time and having other interests and responsibilities besides hurricane relief limits my ability to go down more frequently.

Our motto on Friday was, "it'll look good from my living room." We try to do good work but we can't control what other's do. I'm sure the only way the ceiling will look "good" is if they spray texture on it. Getting it even with volunteers will be a huge challenge.

The Wake County Habitat for Humanity chapter has learned to bring in the professional drywallers to hang and finish the drywall. They can come in a knock it out in a few days. With volunteers normally only working on Thursday, Friday and Saturday it can take several weeks to get the drywall hung and finished.

It always amazes me when someone watches these 30 minute home shows and thinks that's the way things work in real time or believe that watching a show qualifies them as a general contractor. One of my favorite replies when I see something done completely fubared is... "Well, that's one way to do it..."

With as much info at our fingertips on the interweb these days, it's not that hard to search and see how it should be done. It's usually a lot easier than reinventing the wheel.

I have to say, I've learned how to do a few things via youtube videos. I have found more than a few simple fixes for our cars on Youtube, that might have taken several hours of investigation. My son's Honda Fit back seat releases weren't working, the dealer quoted $600 to fix it, because they weren't sure what might be wrong. A quick search on youtube showed the fix, 20 minutes later the cable was resecured and the seats worked fine.