Closet Drywall
We had half a day to get something done today, so we put some drywall up in the new little closet behind the powder room.
(First I would like to apologize for how weirdly blurry these photos are; I think the camera needs to be sent off for a good cleaning after years of construction dust, but I can't bring myself to do it just yet and not have it for a month. We are SO CLOSE to getting this done.)
We started out by making a third curved nailer for the drywall to go into. The plaster lath went right into the side of the stairs, but we built this wall and can't reach that any more (plus that would be a weird way to install drywall). So Noel copied the curved onto a scrap of 2x8 and attached it in place.
As with all great solutions, this one came to me in a dream. Sometimes when I need to puzzle over something that my conscious mind just can't work out on its own for whatever reason, I think about it intently before I fall asleep, and then I dream about potential solutions. Sometimes these are hilariously wrong (use yogurt to seal holes in the wall and it magically turns into plaster!) and sometimes, like this, they just work.
The question was how to get that curve in the ceiling, and this solution combines the drywall used for curved walls -- which is incised with lots of little cuts so it can be worked around a curve -- with the fact that we have a pile of drywall scraps in the hallway waiting to be used up. I cut a series of 2" strips and Noel screwed them in place, and when I tape and mud I can even out the curve and you would never know the drywall was all flat to begin with.
Then we pieced the rest of the ceiling together with various scraps, and used up a lot of stuff. It's time for the scraps of drywall to go away pretty soon, so it's very gratifying to use them up instead of throwing them away.
The two curved side pieces were a little challenging: we made a paper template and then finessed the heck out of them to fit.
The closet is much brighter now, somewhat amusingly lighting up the toilet tank (we haven't yet installed that piece of drywall) and making it look like we intended something very dramatic for that toilet.
The hard parts of the drywalling in the closet are behind us now; the rest is straight lines, which are much easier to manage than curves.
posted by ayse on 01/24/15