wrote in message
...
On Dec 14, 7:09 pm, " wrote:
On Dec 14, 6:19 pm, "MiamiCuse" wrote:





This week I had someone come and bid on installing sheet rock on my
house.
After he looked it over he gave me some valuable advice and said I
should
fix a few things first then call him to do the job.

So here are some of the things I am fixing.

In my house, about 60% of the sheetrock were removed. Some rooms have
both
walls and ceiling removed, some only walls, some only ceiling, depending
on
what was being modified.

He said that in some rooms, where I asked him to patch some holes, that
it's
cheaper and easier to gut and replace then to patch. For example, one
room
I had five holes in the ceiling. I did not make the holes, the
electricians
did. When they rewired they did not get into the attic, so they punched
random holes in my ceiling to pass the wires and conduits. They told me
it
would be easy fix for the sheetrock guys. Now the sheetrock guy says
they
are not easy fix. He can do it but it will not be as good looking and it
will be more expensive then using new sheetrock.

The reason he said these are hard to patch, is because it is not typical
sheet rock. In some areas he said I have sheet rock, then a "brown
coat",
then plaster, with embeded wire mesh in them. He said it is a pain to
patch, and difficult to patch perfectly.

Same with a hallway. I have one hallway that is fifty feet long. About
thirty feet of this sheetrock was removed and now we have to put new.
Again, he said, rip out the other twenty feet, put new 1/2" sheet rock.
Otherwise, I will have to match the old "thickness" which is slightly
more
than 3/4". He said it would be expensive to mix 1/2" and 3/4" and the
result may be questionable.

So in a null shell, he is recommending that I demolish ALL my sheet
rock -
all walls, all ceilings instead of dealing with a mix of old and new.

This week, I started to look at demolishing one room's ceiling, and
immediately ran into problems. Some sheetrock in the ceiling seem to
span
into other rooms. For example, one interior wall's top plate actually is
below the sheetrock, meaning the sheetrock is sandwiched between the top
plate and the bottom of the joist. So to take that ceiling down, I have
to
make a cut on both sides of the top plate to free the sheetrock. This is
a
mess. Using a grinder with a diamond blade to cut through this
sheetrock/brown coat/plaster/wire mesh is slow and dusty. I thought
framing
of the walls is done before sheetrock? How can sheetrock be on top of
the
top plate?

i would gut everything which will make insulating very easy and
uncover any hidden problems that may be lurking under the surfaces to
be removed.

the job will look better if its all the same- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Without actually seeing it, of course, it's hard to give an accurate
opinion. But I tend to agree
that it's probably better to tear the rest out in any areas where
there are lots of holes,
height mis-matches, etc. Pros can put up new drywall really fast and
the material is not that costly.
I suggest you spell out that they use screws, not nails to install it,
so you don't have to deal with
nail pops over the years.

For the sheetrock to be embedded across the top plate, the wall would
have had to have been
added after the house was built. Either that or very strange
construction.

Thanks for the screw reminder. I'll make sure to discuss that point with
him.

It could be both strange construction AND the walls framed after. The house
has a small span because it's a wrapped around house an interior courtyard,
so all the interior walls are non-load bearing, most of them are just there,
standing free without anything sitting on them. The walls are all framed to
be 100" tall. At the base is a 4" wide piece of wood, the three ply sheet
rock sits on top of this strip of wood, making the total height 100". The
wood is 3/4" thick, matching the rock thickness. I guess the wood makes
nailing baseboards easier.