"Last weekend we drank some beers, hung some drywall, played some poker..."

Remember when kids used to say "I hung some drywall" along with a list of other manly activities to joke about being manly? I never really got it back then, but this weekend, Dan and I hung some drywall, and I guess I feel manly for it.

We told each other that drywall (and plumbing) was one reno project we wouldn't undertake ourselves, at least until we've watched a professional do it once and then, maybe..So we spoke with one drywalling duo who quoted us 1000$+, most likely because they lived far and didn't want the job, and we spoke with another company who never got back to us. So off to Lavalley's (like home depot, but they deliver - YES!) we went for supplies, dragging our feet. I'm getting pretty friendly with the old men over there after all the electrical and insulation help they've provided. After we bought supplies, one drywaller got back to us, came to look at the room and quoted 560$ for hanging and three coats of mud, which is actually quite reasonable and they could get started on Tuesday.

Well..we went back and forth on this for a while: pay the drywallers to do it, watch them carefully and see if we could do it ourselves for future projects, also we'd have nothing to do this weekend (I know, BIG problem); or, do it ourselves, potentially mess up our beautiful parlour, but have an extra 560$ in our pockets.

Back and forth, back and forth, Saturday morning rolls around and we still have some prep work for the room. So we tackle that - putting up electrical wires to the second floor and shimming out the wall. We were told by our neighbor John that the wall studs were not all level, specifically, one wall stud jutted out ~1/4"further than the others, so we nailed up some old lath (remember lath? wood strips behind the plaster we demo-ed out) to bring all the other studs to the same level, which process is called "shimming".

 Even as we were "shimming" we were still going back and forth, back and forth. John came over to see our progress, and then all of a sudden he was helping us drywall. He showed us what to watch out for when measuring (most importantly, to make sure both ends of the drywall end up one a stud), how to cut it, how to use his handy dandy tools, etc. Dan and I went out to dinner around 9:30 and then we came right back and kept hanging drywall until 2am. Dan was ready to keel over, but once I get going on these kinds of things, I can go for DAYS. The only reason why I finally relented and stopped was because the drill was probably too noisy for the hour.

drywalling by the light from one lamp

Mango keeping us company through the night.

The next day (Sunday) we continued where we left off, streaming the Federer-Murray Wimbledon final in the background, which equals to a distracted Daniel. Around 4pm we ran into a slight snag: the corner with the radiator didn't have a stud for the drywall:

We hauled off to Home Depot to grab a 2x3 stud, nailed that in - problem solved.
It took us two more evenings after that, but eventually.....

~VOILA~!!

Mudding, taping, and sanding next!