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the ways of guys
Tuesday, November 12 2002Louis the Heineken-drinking general contractor came over today for some work in the attic master bedroom suite. Today's project was the hanging of drywall. In the process, Louis showed me how to cut the stuff, how to screw it to studs and rafters, and things like that. Drywall had been a mystery to me - so fragile, and yet used almost everywhere as the surface of our indoor world. In my construction projects, I'd always used plywood where others used drywall. I never trusted the stuff, and the ease with which I've been ripping it down hasn't made me respect it any more. Nonetheless, that's how walls are built, so I'm trying to learn to work with it. Today was the first time I actually had the experience of seeing a professional put it up. Everything I knew about drywall before today came from the experience of demolishing it. You can learn a lot from demolition; it's how buildings are dissected. But there's no way to learn drywall cutting techniques from building demolition.
We hung drywall on the rafters high above the floor. The space is like a small version of the living room, with high slanting ceilings attached directly to the rafters and a few beams crossing the space to keep the walls from bowing outward. TO get up there and screw in drywall, we had to first build a makeshift scaffold of plywood and two by fours to set atop the rafter ties. We tried working with four by eight foot sheets of drywall, but they were too big to get between the ties, so we had to settle on six by four foot sheets. We got all of today's drywall from a big stack of it that the previous owner had abandoned.[REDACTED] What is it with men that makes them so impulsively right wing? Is it all the moronic gravel-voiced Clear Channel morning radio personalities they listen to while driving to work?[REDACTED]
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