…and you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?”
(…and you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful house”)
We finally, finally got the corridor done. All four pieces of drywall are up and fit…sufficiently well. There’s going to be some patching, some tape-and-joint compound to cover miscuts and a joint that is pretty shonky. Since we’re skimming the whole damn lot we’re hoping it will be okay, but it turned out to be all the nightmares at once.
At first glance, it doesn’t look that bad…
I mean, we got the first board up and apart from cutting around the light fitting that, it turned out, was just caught, not actually in need of a cut-out, it went fine. Well, it took a few goes because our hall is hilariously unsquare.
Things we have learned are that unlike building in brick with plaster over the top it’s better to have a straight wall with a nice 90 degree angle on it and suffer the fact it doesn’t look right somewhere than to try and average out the errors across the house. Our house is a non-parallelogram. It’s made of curvy sides attached at corners that approximate 90 degrees. The floor is unlevel, rising half an inch to the door across a span of about 1 meter. It’s all insane. And we made many compromises to try to make it look kind-of-right. And those are biting us at every turn, because things that should be flat often have a bit of a slope. And it turns out a lot of building materials come in flat and rectangular forms.
So our hall is not square, and yeah… it has been trouble. Despite that thet first board went up yesterday morning without too much pain.
Then we tried to make the second board.
We tried every trick in the book. It was cut slightly overlarge, then scribed to fit the shape. We measured at multiple points. But having put it up-and-down probably 10 times (please recall, these things are f’kin heavy and yet fragile), it still didn’t fit at the end of the day, and it became apparent that it was still far enough out that it wasn’t realistically going to happen without disintegrating. We ended up putting it down and coming home – which was deeply disheartening as it meant that in a day we’d put up one board that’s just under 2 ft wide.
Still; Today we took the challenge up again, and took many more measurements, then hacked off more board, cut off the corner that had been damaged in it’s 800 cycles of raise-and-lower on our shoddy-ass-wavy-wobbly lift, and finally managed to get it in place. I cut the light hole pretty well, then munged the smoke-detector hole. But it’s patchable (which is becoming a mantra).
Kathryn put pretty much all of the many, many screws that hold it up (despite our book saying that if you use glue you don’t need so many screws, that isn’t something that we’ve confirmed with Oly – and frankly, on ceilings, I like them to be screwed in place).
And then we cut the final piece of corridor board, and put that up. The light hole in that one is okay, and the fit along the edges isn’t terrible.
All in all, the corridor is probably adequate. No picture, because it was dark by the time we’d finished, not because I’m afeared to show it. I’ll take a pic tomorrow :)
The good thing is we’ve now cleared enough floor space that we can do the final 3 pieces of ceiling we can do with our drywall lift in the living room area. We’d got the bottom two sections up along the rest of the ceiling:
and it’s just the bit above the lounge which until now has had a big stack of drywall covering the floor. Now there are just two sheets – so we can move one, and the other one goes up on the ceiling, then that one we’ve moved will get put up.
I’ve also started work on the heating plumbing, some of which has to ‘sneak’ into the walls to run to the radiators in the bathrooms, and that has to happen before we can drywall the other side of the walls (we’ve done one side of them already). Then all those interior walls need insulation, the exterior ones need special little blocks for the drywall to screw to (because our floor is 3/4″ higher than the old floor) – and then they can all be drywalled.
The fun with drywall never ends.
Yes, yes, I know, I’m whingy. But as we inch closer to a house that’s liveable, it’s increasingly painful to not be in it.
