...and so endeth the Drywalling

For a change, the planetary alignment was such that DW and I had an entire day to devote to the basement. We both admittedly had some difficulty seeing the finished 'body' of work when all we could see was the skeleton (i.e. the exposed studs.)

However, we treated ourselves to a bit of a sleep-in on Sunday morning, went out to fuel up at Rotten Ronnie's and went downstairs to tackle the remaining work. Yours truly had to finish a couple of sections of wall framing in a rather tricky alcove at the base of the stairs, and DW busied herself with plastering until we were ready to move on to the drywall, because that's definitely a two-person job when you have to move full sheets around.

One of the real "joys" of this place is the fact that the basement floor is anything but level, a fact which has really played hell with some of the cuts and measurements. It just makes for some interesting positioning of the drywall and the framing if you look at things too closely. If I had to do it all over again, I probably would have taken a different approach, even with having to complete someone else's work (which is what we're stuck with at the Shagwell-Stone manor.)

As an example, I was ready to cut the second-last piece of drywall for that pesky alcove and I decided to actually take a few moments with my measurements. When I checked, I saw that my top wall frame and my bottom wall frame measurements were about 2" off. Yikes. Now, I knew that my framing solution was dictated by that mass of poorly-planned ducting, but I wasn't quite prepared for that particular "oops". Fortunately, my choice of building materials totally saved my can. The advantage of steel track and studs is the ability to reposition things as required. I'll spare you the gory technical details, but suffice it to say, I took advantage of a well-placed joint in the top track and repositioned just about everything so that the framing was, well, almost square. We figured we could apply some strategic positioning and fastening of the drwall too handle the rest.

And, ya know...it actually worked.

We have WALLS!!

It's actually a pretty sizeable task off our shoulders. Granted, we still have to finish adding things like corner beading, then plastering everything to make sure it's ready for priming, but it's a hell of a lot closer to "done" than it was at 11AM on Sunday.

The larger tasks are getting the sub-floor in and deciding on flooring, as well as hanging the drop-ceiling. My smaller tasks include getting the door installed on the partition, adding the bi-fold to the pantry, and some other assorted carpentry jobs.

We got a whole pile of work done this weekend and it actually feels like we have a liveable basement.