Drywall is up!

Friday the drywall guys started.  They started by measuring the stairs like 5 times just to be sure…  Kieren, the boss guy exclaimed in his thick irish accent, “I was up all night thinking about this.”  Sure enough, a sheet of drywall doesn’t fit up the stairs… It’s really close though.  I think every guy measured the stairs just to be sure.  So, they began the painstaking alternate way to get drywall up.  Scaffolding and a window.

Here’s a picture through the kitchen window.  One guy stands at each level of the scaffolding and they hoist the drywall up one sheet at a time.

There were 6 guys I think.  They needed that many to get all the drywall into the house.  After all the drywall was in, they went to town hanging it.  Since there were so many guys, it went really fast.  They hung everything they had but they were short maybe 3 sheets.

I’ll give you a tour.  Lets start in the laundry/closet:

Moving on to the bathroom

If we go around into the hallway

And peek in the half bath

Turn around from there and head into the den. Here we had a beam wrapped and the ceiling covered. The ceiling was in good shape but there was some Calcimine peeling and the easiest thing to do is to cover it. We have a bit of calcimine peeling here and there in the house but we can patch little spots. The den ceiling was the worst area.

and the beam in the den was wrapped

If we run up to the 3rd floor, we can take a peek in the “boy’s room” and see all the plaster mixing equipment as well as some of the patch work they did there.

Some interesting things to note: The pros all called the drywall “blue board.” At first I thought maybe it was some Massachusetts thing. Maybe they call it blue board because the old kind was blue or something. But no, it really is a blue/gray color. It’s lighter and stiffer than traditional drywall and has a tiny bit of texture on the surface. I’m interested to see what it looks like after they put up the plaster. The bags they have are labeled Veneer plaster. I’m not sure if that’s different than the stuff I’ve seen before. I’ve always used pre-mixed Spackle and I assumed that’s what the pros would use just not pre-mixed.

Have you had drywall done before? Was the drywall blue? What kind of mud did they use?

It’s been a dusty weekend and they haven’t even started sanding. Two more days and I’ll get to work cleaning! Yayyy Walls.

Sarah

P.S. We kept our bedroom at 62 degrees last night. It’s been set to 52 all winter but now that we have walls, normal sleeping temperatures it is! It was glorious!