Bloody e-bayers

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As the weather has gradually got less clement (is that a thing? I mean, it’s inclement, so surely it’s becoming less clement? ;) ) we’ve paused a little on our painting odyssey. Which is kinda frustrating – we’ve painted the eaves on the south and the west side, we’ve also painted all but the last approximately 8 feet of the north side. But the weather’s been misty and damp – which isn’t ideal for painting – so we’re holding off until the weekend when it’s meant to be just overcast, rather than mizzley.

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It’s made a difference that’s big to us, but probably subtle to everyone else. Making the house feel more finished. It’s kinda pleasing, despite being a job we’d never really factored into our scheduling.

I’ve also been continuing my quest to attach all the cedar in the world to our house. I did a count today and we may, just may, have enough. It’s going to be spectacularly tight though. It’s a pretty simple, albeit long, job. And I’m not hugely looking forward to the next round of planing as I’d really hoped that the drywall would be out of the way before then. However, particularly after today’s little… experience, it won’t be.

So – we got a drywall lift. The listing (still up on ebay) says that it can lift 150lbs to a 15′ sloped ceiling. Interestingly, it’s now saying it can only lift a 4’x8′ sheet, but the manual (and I use that term loosely) that comes with it says it can lift a 4’x12′ sheet – and the extension bars that it comes with clearly make a 4’x12′ sheet possible.

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However, it’s also clearly a piece of crap. Ropey welds and a wire-rope feed that scrapes the wire up against the winch wheel. It’s nasssty to use and our 100lbs (45kg) drywall sheets are clearly very near it’s real maximum, especially at full extension. Which we’ll get to.

So yesterday we put up the second and third drywall sheets that we’ve ever put up in our lives. There’s a little tweaking needed, we didn’t put enough screws down the edges (but the middle is fine). The summary of that process is: it was a total mare. It took us about 2 hours per sheet – which is a ridiculous amount of time, although some of that is just the sheer weight of the sheet, and some of it is dealing with the unsquareness of the house, but most of it is trying to get it into position. Partly that’s because we’ve gone with a single 12′ sheet cut down to the 138″ width of the room which means that it’s tight to get in there, and then getting it up to ceiling height is a pig. Oh, and did I mention – they’re f’kin heavy. Right at our limit for carrying and positioning with any kind of vague accuracy.

Also, as has been mentioned these are the second and third sheets we’ve ever put up and it turns out that starting off with cathedral ceilings is perhaps not the simplest of things to start off with.

Anyhow, despite the lift making some moderately unpleasant noises, we got the drywall up on the bottom two sections of the cathedral ceiling in our bedroom:

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And so today we set to on the top sheet and a bit. Now, this is where things start to get tricky. We’re dealing with both the unsquareness of the house, and the (and this bit is our fault) unsquareness of the 13′ high walls. See, 13′ it turns out is really beyond our limit for lifting and accurately fixing. So when we got the walls ‘up’ there was not as much straightness as we’d like*. Now, cathedral ceilings are prone to cracking at the seams anyway, it turns out, so I’d found this stuff called “x-crack” which is meant to help with that problem and with unsquare walls. So having made some extra little bits of triangular wood which made a flat section at the peak of the roof (helping to remove part of our unsquareness), and applied X-crack (removing a bit more of our unsquareness), we cut and fit our little thin section that goes right up at the top.

Now the theory was that this would leave a 4’0.25″ gap at the top.

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It did not.

Which is about par for how this has gone. Instead, it ended up with a 3’11.something-just-shy-of-four-foot gap, which was really quite annoying. Still, we reasoned, rather than take down the teeny drywall sheet we’d just really very carefully manoeuvred up and fixed in place, the x-crack, the triangular bits of wood then recut the wood bits shorter, fit them back…then the x-crack, then recut the thin bit of drywall to make it thinner**, then get it back up, we decided that discretion was the better part of valour and we’d cut the 4′ wide board down just a smidge (which in this case is 0.5″).

That done we loaded it up onto the hoist. The hoist that the listing said can lift up to a 15′ sloped ceiling, I remind you.

About 11′ later we discovered that our lift cannot lift to a 15′ ceiling.

It’s limit is a good 18″ lower than that. And actually, when you read the specs in the manual it says that an extension bar is required for that final bit of lifting***. An extension bar which was not included. So we are pondering various ideas for what to do now. Do we do all the bits we can do and then come back for the high bits when we’ve got an extension bar? Do we even trust the damn thing with an extension bar…? It is f’ckin terrifying the way it creaks and groans lifting these boards, no matter what it’s official weight limit is. At the current maximum height I think it’s got nearly 20cm of play horizontally. I’m currently engaged in ranting complaining moderately politely at the person who sold it on e-bay. If I’d’ve known it wasn’t able to lift to our 13’6″ ceilings, I’d not have bought it, obviously. Because why would I want a lift that’s not capable of doing what we need?

At any rate, we need to come up with a plan, because currently we have a lot of drywall on the floor, and a distinct lack of it on the ceiling.

* and wanting more straightness is a damn rare occurrence around here.
** which is technically thinner than is recommended for x-crack, but is what we’ve ended up with because of other compromises.
*** Well, actually, it lists its maximum height as 110 ft (or 33.6m), which I think is probably an error.

KateWE

Kate's allegedly a human (although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise). She's definitely not a vampire, despite what some other people claim. She's also mostly built out of spite and overcoming oppositional-sexism, racism, and other random bullshit. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, she's here to reassure that it's all fine.