I had a reasonably good weekend building and made a start on drywalling the ceiling. Firstly, I wanted to get a job done to complete any work required on the stud work. Because I need to allow ventilation of the doorway area, where the DAW is, I need to link this between the air inlet and the air outlet. These were basically a couple of square holes where some ducting would run. I made a couple of square shapes of stud work from four short lengths. These were then screwed in the stud walls into the alcoves. >>photos<<
I then started work on the drywall, though not before having a reorganise of the garage (store room/workshop ATM). The drywall was underneath the rest of the RockSilk and four sheets of MDF so I spent some time putting the MDF in its own pile with the RockSilk on top and having a general sort out to make cutting the drywall easier. I'll be cutting the sheets in here as there is plenty of space. I decided to attach the first two ceiling layers first before doing a wall layer. These will effectively bring the ceiling level with the bottom edge of the joists. This went pretty well at first and a managed to get a few pieces up quite quickly with the aid of my drywall lift and the electric drywall driver. I had got 5 lengths up and secured in place by the end of the day. So quite positive and ready to crack on on Sunday...
OK, things didn't go quite as well on Sunday. Because of the width and position of the doorway wall there was no joist above where I needed to screw the drywall in the corner. To overcome this I had created a ledge 25mm high above the top plate to accommodate the recessed layers and a step to allow the covering layer to lock above the step into place before screwing to the remaining joists. My first attempt I tried to put one recessed length up then push the second underneath but this was never going to work. The layer already in place was able to drop down onto the ledge and all my efforts to put the second layer on the ledge below the first were in vain!!!!!!
I had spent ages trying to get this to work but I had to give up and have a rethink. I had to take a breather here and re-evaluate this job so I took down the lengths and had clear up, as I had made a bit of a mess trying to get this to work. It was obvious that I would not get the two layers in place one at a time and the only way would be to insert the two layers together. I was able to use one of the original lengths underneath but I cut a new outer piece as the other had got too damaged. Having cut the new piece I sandwiched them together with a small amount of caulk in between. I put a couple of screws through the two to ensure they wouldn't slide off line. I also cut the pieces slightly narrower than before and chamfered the edges that were to locate on the ledge (groove).
The job was still not easy and with a bit of bashing along the edge with a mallet against a wooden block I somehow got the pieces in place. This was then pushed into the recess and screwed up!!!!! What a relief to see this up there - I thought I was never going to get this done!
I knew I was going to get the odd day like this when things didn't go the way I had planned but, to be honest, this is the first time during the build when things were well and truly stacked up against me. This was always going to a tricky part of the ceiling but the rest of the drywall should be plain sailing from here. I called it a day after finishing this - it's sometimes better to cut your losses and start afresh on another day. A whole morning and the best part of the afternoon to get two 36cm strips of ceiling drywall in place!!!!!