Exteme underground drywalling!

Yesterday, the adventures in hanging the drywall commenced. Rick showed up by himself. So he couldn't start with the garage like I had hoped. He started back in the office, and worked his way around the outside walls throughout the day. He found the ICF easy to attach the drywall to. Then he got to the wall in the family room running parallel to the joists, and had his first fun. He found that he had to remove over spray from the foam that had been applied to the roof. The joist was pretty much in the way of doing this.

Then he realized he was going to have to wait on this wall, until some of the drywall that was on the floor, was out of the way. Oh well, on to the kitchen.

All the drywall up, above and below the plywood support for the cabinets.

Then Rick started to work on fitting drywall to the curves at the top of the windows. He found that things did not line up vary evenly with the window frame, and that getting the drywall to look good around the window was going to take some work.

I went to lunch, and when I got back, I found that I had lost a window, and had a more Hobbit sized entrance.

Thats not funny, give me back my window and full door!

Rick has seen the light, and works on opening the window.

Now what about my door? I'm short, but not that short.

That's better. The windows are now looking more finished.

He also cut open the drywall covering the door :-)

Now today, Rick had an assistant, Jeff. Jeff didn't know what he was in for. The boards in the garage, were 12 feet long to start with, and two of the walls got type X which is also thicker than the standard drywall. Those sheets are much heavier than a 4 by 8 standard sheet. To top it off, because of certain framing/plumbing/electrical fire safety issues, we were putting up two layers of the type X on those walls. To add a real fun twist, I had put 2 inches of foam insulation on those walls so they didn't have a good sense of where the studs were, and they had to use 4 inch drywall screws. Neither one of them had ever used 4 inch drywall screws! But wait there's more....the type X had to go all the way up to the steel decking. So they also had to carve the top to come pretty close to matching the profile of the ridges in the decking on one wall, and get around the joists sticking down on the other. Oh and they got to deal with two different slopes they had to accommodate. One from the floor sloping toward the garage entrance, and the other from the roof sloping perpendicular to the floor slope. Did I mention getting the drywall cut around the steel angle that runs perpendicular to the joists to stiffen them?

In the morning, they started from the bottom on the first layer, and found how much fun it was going to be to run the 4 inch screws.

 They notched the boards to go around the joist work.

After they had gotten pretty far along on the first layer we broke for lunch. I had an errand to take care of and when I got back, I found they were well into the second layer. They had learned some things on the first layer, and the results were looking pretty good. The screws were also less trouble on the second layer since they didn't go into the studs as far.

Jeff had to leave, so I helped Rick move some boards around and he worked on the third wall.

When we left for the day, the wall was mostly covered.

Tomorrow the tape and mud will start to be applied to the seams and the screws. Dependent upon how things go, they may have the first coat on all the walls tomorrow. From talking to Rick, I may be able to start with primer and paint early next week.