Better Than Plumb

Built-ins: speed bumps in the construction process

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 20:58:29 GMT

“You’re not going to do any built-ins, are you?” That’s my wife talking. She actually likes all the built-in shelves and cabinets I’ve added to our house. And she loves the built-in window seat in the living room. But built-ins inevitably take time, and she’s eager for me to finish the new bedroom upstairs that I’ve been framing and drywalling. Given how tolerant she has been of my renovations over the past 18 years, she’s entitled to a little impatience at this point.

So I skipped the built-in bookcases in the kneewalls on each side of the dormer. And I skipped the built-in shelves for art and books at the top of the stairs that Chuck Miller suggested. (Cynthia hates it when I ask Chuck for ideas because he has a lot of them, and they’re often too good to ignore.) But I couldn’t resist some built-in shelves beside the chimney where I had to fur out a wall to hide the vent pipe from the range hood.

It’s a huge pipe (10 in., I think) for a remote fan that sits on the roof and is capable, according to the guy who sold it to me, of exchanging all the air in my house in about 10 minutes. I needed such a big fan because I’m one of those idiots who never cooks but had to have a big commercial-style range. The ultimate irony, of course, is that when I do cook, I never use the vent fan because it’s too noisy. Actually, it’s not the fan that’s noisy. It’s on the roof, and I can’t even hear it. But the rushing air sounds like a jet plane taking off. Anyway, the deep space behind that wall was just too big to ignore.

Years ago, I worked on an article about designing built-ins with an architect named Louis Mackall. When I photographed his work, I saw several built-in shelving units with no trim around them. Instead, the baseboard ran continuously across the bottom, and the painted walls just rolled into the recessed case, which was also painted. Unfortunately, I never asked Louis how he detailed the connection between the walls and the case, but I came up with my own method, which I used in our living room.

I make a box, or carcase, out of MDF because it’s cheap and it takes paint well. I position the box in the wall so that the baseboard runs across the bottom piece of MDF and serves as the nosing. The other three sides have a 1/8-in.-deep by 1/2-in. rabbet in the leading edge (see drawing). I radius the very inside edge of the box with a 1/8-in. roundover bit in a laminate trimmer. Then I use drywall tape and compound, laid into the rabbet, to cover the joint between the drywall and the MDF. The radiused edge of the box serves as a ground for the taping knife, just like the rounded edge on a piece of metal corner bead.

It worked great in my living room. At least it worked great until a big crack opened up between the drywall and the box. I think the wall cracked because I used fiberglass-mesh tape to cover the joints instead of using paper tape. At the time, I was in love with mesh tape because it has adhesive on it and is easier to use. Now I know that it’s not as strong as paper tape. Upstairs, I’m using paper tape. We’ll see what happens. If anybody knows of a better way to detail a built-in cabinet like this, please add a comment below.

The $65 drywall

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:25:58 GMT

A 4x8 sheet of drywall at my local lumberyard costs $11.29. So far, I’ve bought 42 sheets, spread out over four trips, to drywall the upstairs of my 200-year-old Cape. I bought 20 sheets the first time, 10 the next, then two trips of 6 sheets each. Why didn’t I buy them all at once, you might wonder.

Well, after I loaded up the first 20 sheets, my truck gave me a dirty look. She knows her primary job is to support my image as the editor of Fine Homebuilding, and she clearly balked at the idea of being sullied by real work. So I stopped at 20, which she deigned to carry home.

The next problem is that the drywall has to be carried up my winding staircase, and nobody wants to carry 42 sheets of drywall up a winding staircase. At first 20 seemed a reasonable number, but as you'll see, reasonable diminished with each trip to the lumberyard. For the first load, I made the mistake of asking Brian Pontolilo if he would stop by my house and help me carry the drywall upstairs.

Brian is both younger and in better shape than I am, so he wanted to carry the sheets two at a time rather than break them apart. Like bundles of three-tab asphalt shingles, drywall has actually gotten much heavier over the 30 years that I’ve been carrying it. But of course, I couldn’t let on to Brian that I had any problem with doubled-up sheets. In fact, I told him it was shame that 12-ft. sheets wouldn’t fit up the stairs. For all my subsequent trips, though, it seemed safer to rely on my wife and my 74-year-old father-in-law for help. With them, I could pretend I wanted to carry the doubled-up sheets, but was deferring to their weaker constitutions.

The final reason I didn’t buy all my drywall at once is that the rooflines, dormers, and timbers upstairs at my house break up the space in such peculiar ways that I couldn’t possibly calculate how much I needed. Not one sheet, for instance, has been installed whole. I’ve had to cut every one. I’m convinced that if you added up the square footage of all my waste, I’ve thrown away half of those 42 sheets.

Now, I’m notoriously bad at math, but I think 50% waste effectively doubles the cost of the drywall, which gets me up to $22.58 per sheet. When you add in my labor, slowed considerably by my trim-carpenter mentality, the cost really skyrockets. Without a doubt, though, the most expensive drywall I’ve installed so far is the narrow piece I scribed against the stonework at the end of the hall.

The piece is trapped between the stone and an adjacent wall, so I couldn’t position an oversized piece of drywall close enough to scribe it directly. Instead, I had to make a pattern. I stapled rosin paper to the nearest stud and used a General compass to trace the profile of the stonework onto the paper. I cut out the pattern with scissors, laid it on a piece of drywall, and traced again. A utility knife, a drywall saw, and a measure of patience got the shape cut into the drywall. I had to do a little fine-tuning, but considered myself lucky that my first piece worked. The process took about an hour, during which time I kept wondering, how would Myron Ferguson have done this?

In the end, I figure that one piece of drywall cost about $65. (It’s not an arbitrary number. My scribed drywall has to be worth more than William Alexander’s $64 Tomato.) And that’s before I finish it. When I faced a similar challenge downstairs, I scribed again at the taping stage, using a piece of paper drywall tape, to get me even closer to the stones. Anybody know where the line is between craftsmanship and anal compulsion?

When trim carpenters rock

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:23:17 GMT

I hate drywall. Actually, I don’t hate drywall. I hate hanging drywall…and taping it, and finishing it, and, of course, sanding it. Oh, and I hate painting drywall, too, but that’s not really the drywall’s fault. I hate painting anything.

For any serious tradesman, there are really only two goals: to do good work, and to do it quickly. When I’m hanging drywall, I fail on both counts. I do a lousy job, and it takes me a long time. This is particularly depressing if you’ve ever watched professionals work.

I used to build houses in Maine, where most of the drywall crews were French Canadian (they call it “sheederock” up there). I remember my first encounter with the crew we used. They were already at work as I was getting out of my truck, and I nearly hit the ground when I heard their screw guns, which sounded like automatic-weapon fire they were going so fast. It’s no wonder that lunchboxes and 4-ft. levels tended to disappear if you were foolish enough to leave them in a stud bay when those guys were on the job.

My problem is that I’m a trim carpenter at heart. When I fit boards together, I’m shamed by any gap you could slip a matchbook cover into. But with drywall, gaps as big as 1/2 in. are okay because, say it with me, “Mud will fill it.” Unfortunately, I was trained to recognize 1/2 in. as “a gap you could throw a cat through.” Hence, despite knowing better, I still try to fit drywall as though it were mahogany paneling.

Okay, you’re thinking, that explains why it takes me a long time, but how does it result in a lousy job? First of all, you can’t cut drywall with a tablesaw, though I swear I would if no one was looking, and you can’t fine-tune it with a block plane. You’ve got a utility knife and Surform plane (or the homemade equivalent, see photo below), which means you never really get an accurate cut. A drywall guy allows for this by always cutting pieces 1/4 in. smaller than the measurement. Because I’m genetically hard-wired to do so (read “stupid”), I cut my pieces exactly to the measurement, which means they never fit the first time.

Now the only thing harder than cutting a piece of drywall to an exact measurement is removing 1/4 in. from a piece that didn’t fit the first time. You have to score both faces, break off little chunks, and then rasp the whole edge, all the while making a big mess and berating yourself for being such an idiot in the first place. Of course, the piece still won’t fit, and by this point, you’re so frustrated you violate another cardinal rule of drywall: You try to force it, ignoring the little voice in your head that’s screaming at you not to force it. And inevitably, the fragile edge breaks, and you’re forced to excavate a baseball-size cavity that you feel horrible about despite the fact that “mud will fill it.”

You might think that someone so challenged by the demands of drywall hanging would at least own a router for cutting in electrical boxes. But I don’t hang drywall often enough to justify owning one (an excuse, by the way, that I would never trot out for a carpentry tool, wherein even suspecting I might need it is justification for buying one). Besides which, and as you may have already noticed, trim carpenters are very proud of their ability to measure accurately. So I cut out electrical boxes ahead of time, which affords me more opportunities to violate the aforementioned cardinal rule and create even more baseball-size cavities.

All these problems are compounded if you happen to be hanging drywall upstairs in a 200-year-old half-Cape filled with odd sizes, weird angles, and precious little that’s plumb or square. And that reminds me of another thing that I hate about hanging drywall: the waste. There’s no good way to make use of all the leftover pieces. All you can do is feel guilty about sending them to the dump and hope that drywall recycling catches on soon.

The one big consolation for all my trials hanging drywall is that it marks one of the magic moments in the building process. When drywall goes up, rooms happen. They always look smaller than they did when they were simply framed, but rooms will be defined by drywall in a way that bare studs just can’t. When the drywall goes up, you get a visceral sense of being that much closer to your goal, which is, ultimately, making a place to live.